Stone in Love

I have just rekindled an old love affair.

Defined as a strong feeling of affection or a great interest and pleasure in something, love is indeed a wonderful experience. All consuming, all engaging and all encompassing; the world is a different place when you are in love. You are in a different place. A magical place.

There is a saying, “True love will always return.” And it has.

The true love I am referring to is stone – or more specifically dry stone walling.

I have always felt an affinity with stone and some of my earliest memories are of building little dry stone walls with the shale and rubble that flanked the pile of proper walling stone my father had used to build all sorts of walls at home.
More recently I rekindled my relationship with dry stone walling, about 4 or 5 years ago, after repairing a few walls that had collapsed at my own cottage in the hills. I immediately experienced that heart-felt connection, the love and reverence for the material and the art and actively pursued several courses and days working with one of the best dry stone wallers in Wales.

I tried to get funding to enable me to take my relationship further but my aversion to form filling and begging telephone calls was stronger than my desire for financial help, hence my stone affair was limited to repairing the frost-blown collapsing walls around the cottage and for existing client’s who were grateful that I could turn my hand to repairing their boundaries as part of maintaining their garden.

And then last weekend by a strange twist of fate, I attended a dry stone walling and mindfulness course at www.palpung.org.uk

I am also pretty passionate about mindfulness and personal accountability. And seeing the two being advertised hand in hand immediately made me want to get my hand back into the walling. The whole process was executed so smoothly and almost effortlessly that I deemed it obvious the universe wanted me to revisit it too.

Experience tells me that rekindling a love affair is not normally a good thing – things have moved on – circumstances will have changed. Distant memories are often preferable to current reality. But not in this case. I fell straight back into the arms of my beloved stone. And that has prompted this blog. I have written up details of the course itself for a national newspaper and will include it on my website in due course – however, something else happened that weekend. Something far more satisfying than constructing a wall.

Was it linked to the venue being the Buddhist Centre, was it the mindful aspect or was it just a planetary intervention? Or a mash of all three and maybe more? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter – what matters is the outcome, the raised awareness, the improved understanding of self. That’s love for you.

So where to begin? To reiterate, I love stone. There is solidity, reliability, a grace and humbleness to it. I have always appreciated stone. I can’t elaborate on that. I also used to engrave it.

In my guise as a landscape gardener, I have just spent a few delicious days repairing several flights of stone steps for a client which involved compo and PVA – and, obviously, stone. So my love isn’t limited to dry stone walling, it encompasses all stone work and even stone stacking and stone balancing but dry stone walling is where my real passion lies. There is something about the way in which the stone ties together, organically; the way in which individual pieces can work together to create something beautiful, magnificent, strong, durable, resilient, and even powerful. It is the collaboration, the process, the principles, the ability, and possibilities and results which all serve to engage me fully, which capture my attention. And yet that’s not where the magic lay last weekend. The magic was to be found not in the collaboration but the separation. That special ‘light-bulb’ moment when I realised that I love these structures, I don’t want to be ‘like’ them. Let me try to be more succinct. I get a great deal of satisfaction facilitating it, creating it and appreciate its beauty, value and very essence but I don’t want to be part of that creation – the masses, the wall.

Whilst on any course or learning platform, the words that stab fear into me are, “OK let’s work in pairs” – or even worse – “groups.” No. I want to work alone. I don’t want to be part of a group. And I realise that it is not a terribly socially acceptable attitude. In an age where people are promoting communities, collaboration and teamwork, preferring solitude and personal space isn’t cool.

Another of my passions bears a remarkable similarity. Bee keeping – or bee borrowing as I prefer to call it, I don’t profess to keep them. I am completely and totally in love and consumed by the workings of a colony and hive. And it is the same principle as the dry stone wall; lots of little dedicated parts or components making one strong, powerful, efficient sum or unit. The efficiency and success of the hive is completely dependant on the collaboration and unity of thousands of little hardworking beings all efficient and successful in their own way. And of course this behaviour has given rise to the phrase ‘hive mind’, meaning ‘a notional entity consisting of a large number of people who share their knowledge or opinions with one another, regarded as producing either uncritical conformity or collective intelligence.’

But whilst I have the utmost respect and reverence for the honey bees and even the individual pieces of stone and the part they all play in creating an efficient and effective structure, no part of me wants to belong to a crowd, association, organisation, pack, troop or even small group.

I have had the most amazing opportunities in my life, most of which I have exploited cheerfully but there is no doubt that if I were able to be a little more compliant and convivial and happy to contribute by being a stone in the wall or a bee in the hive, then I would be more successful than I am now. By successful I mean, working smarter and achieving more with considerably less (physical) effort. Now I appreciate that this is a discussion and a blog in it’s own right and I’m not going to get embroiled in its merits now but, suffice to say, I know that if I were more ‘sociable’ then my life would be ‘easier’.

Good job ‘easy’ has never turned my head.

It has taken a long time to attain the awareness that I am a solo player; the solitary standing stone rather than the tie-stone in a stretch of stone wall. Or a solitary bumble bee rather than a nurse bee or forager in the hive.

And even longer to accept it. But accepting it I am. And it feels good. Don’t get me wrong, there are people I like. A lot. And whose company I value and respect. But they are few and far between. And funnily enough they are stand-aloners too. You won’t find them in crowds, you’ll find them out in nature, usually alone or with a dog.

Whilst I have no desire, and actually a strong aversion, to being part of a crowd, it doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to contribute. To the contrary, finding one’s own way and one’s self creates beneficial knowledge and essential awareness. I would like to find an authentic way to share these findings, only because they have benefitted me so satisfactorily. I have never had the desire to teach, or worse, to preach, but I do have a huge drive and motivation to encourage others to explore. To explore the possibilities and exploit the probabilities.

So not only did I have the most amazing day re-acquainting myself with my love of dry stone walling I also received the unexpected gift of further self revelation and personal insights. The more we know and accept about ourselves, the more effective we can be in utilising our authentic strengths – and weaknesses. And all from the love of stone!

He who knows others is learned; He who knows himself is wise.
~Lao-tzu, Tao te Ching