The Earth Waits

I have delayed in getting to the discussion of the third element in our series of Learning to Listen at the Listening Post in which we focused on the element of earth. The following are from some of my notes. We grounded ourselves in a long journaling practice for this retreat after holding a stone in our hand and reflecting on the questions:
"How have I been formed by choices I did not make?"
"How have been formed by choices I did make?"
"What is waiting to be formed in me now?"
This was followed by time in triads listening to each other regarding the idea of waiting and formation.


The element of Earth: soil, clay, sand, dust, mud, minerals, and the form we are going to use today in our listening practice: stone. The element of Earth is associated with the direction of north, the color white and the images of sleep, renewal, reflection, turning inward and waiting. Here in Alaska, as the snow comes, the soil freezes and the plants and trees pull inward to wait for spring, we too feel the change in the earth and the season of waiting.
But in the form of stone, the essence of waiting is much longer than a season. The oldest rocks on Earth are 3.5 billion years old. Once when hiking down into the Grand Canyon I had nearly reached the river and looked up to see a small sign on the rock layer by me saying “This Vishnu rock layer is 1.7 billion years old.” It stopped me in my tracks. There by the Colorado River, I looked up at the layers and layers of rock that rose a mile above me and felt the weight of time. It pressed down on me like the compressed layers of stone encircling me. And just for a moment there in a great silence, I felt the waiting of these rocks. And I began to understand those that say the stones speak. They hold the history, stories, storms, sun and energies of centuries..and yet I can hold them now in my hand. This rock is from the isle of Iona, Scotland where they most beautiful rocks I have ever seen pile up on Columba Bay, smooth and polished, in a rainbow of colors, deemed to be at least 1500 million years old.
Waiting..
A few days ago, on NPR, there was a small segment called My Grandson The Rock that reported on the work of Professor Robert Hazen who proposes after a long series of arguments about the evolution of minerals that “This is it. It’s the coevolution of life and rocks. Rocks make life. Life makes rocks.” To quote the article. “we are a delicate package of of water, organic chemistry, and minerals held together perhaps by something like will. Then when we die, we go ashes to ashes back into the ground and become minerals again until those same minerals get reorganized into plants, which get eaten by a cow that gets made into a hamburger that gets eaten by a child who goes out and throws a Frisbee. I guess it’s no surprise the two sides dance with each other.”
The more life there is, the more rocks there are. Who knew? When you think about it, it seems so beautiful.”
Maybe that explains why I and so many others I know, can’t help picking up rocks wherever they go. Maybe a distant relation?
As we enter into our listening practice, I sense these rocks so wise in waiting, can help us learn also about listening…to our inner selves, to others and to the Holy..

“If we think of ourselves as coming out of the earth,
rather than having been thrown in here from
somewhere else, we see that we are earth, we are
the consciousness of earth. And this is the voice of the earth.”
Joseph Campbell