The rock

For the last number of weeks, I have been looking for totems, significant items suitable for a weekly altar I will be creating this fall. During my walks in nature, or swims in the ocean, on dawn filled mornings and breezy calming evenings in nature, I have kept my eyes open. Looking to see, and to greet. And maybe receive.

It’s been a great way to enter nature consciously, too. I have seen so much beauty. So many details. And in a slower pace than perhaps I would have otherwise?

I have found wood, and feathers, and rocks. Mushrooms and flowers. I have seen spiders eat prey, fish jump on top of other fish. I have heard so many versions of wind through different greens. And many, many birds singing; owl’s calling. So many things … so much beauty … Hozhona.

The one item I’ve more than any other been awaiting, is a large, rounded rock. During my many 5Rhythms dances in Los Angeles in May and June, my teachers sometimes had this amazing, grounding big and rounded rock centered on the altar or inspirational center of the room. And I loved it. So I knew all these weeks that I awaited finding this rock for us …

This morning, I found it.

Early up, in my parents house in the country side, I went out for a precious walk down through the forest and to the lake. Precious not only for it’s beauty and healing quality, but also because I’ve taken this walk many hundreds of times over the 37 years that my family have owned this country home (which belonged to my darling grand parents when I grew up).

Just upon leaving the dirt road to enter the forest path, a super big and very old tree lays on the ground, roots facing up. It’s given in, a natural death. I stop by this beautiful giant creature to experience its beauty, meditate, to soak it in, in awe. It’s truly magnificent. Funky tree mushrooms are growing in generous groups on what used to be the trees attachment to mother Earth.

And there. In a dark womb of mother Earth, a hole which has been covered by this tree for maybe 150-200 years, underneath where it has grown its entire lifetime – there is the rock. It is buried, and I must dig it out. Be there it is. It is with reverence I receive this lovely sample of Rock Spirit, to bring grounding qualities to many, many dancers and yogis. What a joy.

Digging out the rock, I am reminded of what a dear friend told me earlier this summer. We sat on a cliff in the archipelago, throwing some stones into the sea, when he mindfully said: “I always think, when I throw a rock into the sea: This might be the last pair of human hands that ever touches this rock.”

As the big rock leaves the soil and allows me to lift it out from the ground and into the light, I am aware that mine are most likely the first human hands to ever hold it …