! The Stone And I

By the edge of the mini-pond where I sit when the weather’s fit for it, there’s this stone. I’d like to call it a rock because that sounds more dignified and metaphorical and carries more tradition, but it’s a stone and on it grows a lichen; not the vivid, flat, yellow and vermilion and red and black lichen that grows on stone walls by the seaside; this one has those colours at its edge but has a furry crop of tiny green fronds cropping from its mossy green which are quite vigorous in their tiny way. I liked it so much that I tried to get the other stones around the pond to match, by douching them alternately with urine and yoghourt in the approved manner after dark for obvious reasons but they didn't respond; I guess stonecrop beautiful word knows its own field so to speak and won't be rushed, at least it makes me treasure this one more If I had the money which I haven’t and the patience which I don’t I’d have a perfect, model Zen garden complete with sand which I’d rake with a wooden rake every morning into swirly lines with graceful sweeping Tai Chi movements until I got bored but I just have this stone with faintly Japanese pretensions mine not its however I’d like to think a Zen master would quite approve of my modest intention and say, less is more, more or less… and now I think of it, the stone has its own Zen garden; though whether you could call this an eco-system, whether the stone and the lichen have a relationship, is open to question, as is whether the stone so agreeably placed by the pool well OK pond has a relationship with the pond anyway, on a sunny day the stone and I sit there together if together is quite the right word I feel we’re together whatever it feels if it feels at all that is and I guess it's even possible in an evolutionary view of things, lichen on stone, first life on earth and all that, that the lichen and I are really related, with a common ancestor which would account for a lot and we sit there quietly in quite a Japanese sort of Zen-ness of being one with nature and I become don’t laugh more stony and still; as for the stone I really can’t say but It feels good and in this state of relaxed contemplation which I guess is the point of those Japanese gardens it occurs to me that the stone and perhaps the water too have qualities that I lack – they know just how to be, to be still, to be themselves so there may be a point to what we sometimes call with the trace of a sneer, communing with nature since as Saint Augustine said the whole cosmos is our holy book; so why not open it * [with a namaste to Augustine and Eckhart Tolle]