I grew up on the shores of Galveston, along the Texas coastline. One of the first stories I’ve been told about myself was concerning love at first sight– between my tender infant self, and island waves, slacking and drawing on browned sand. My first meeting with the ocean was one of craze. Still in the crawling stage, I darted on all chubby fours toward the surf as soon as I was set down by my father on its weeded beach. Clearly, I was stolen. Stolen from my family, reasoning, and sense of survival by the enthusiasm to dive into the briny sea for which I had no idea how to navigate myself through.
Similarly, in my early years of college, I found myself in a trance each time I would set off to explore the western slopes of Colorado I lived on. Even while intently picking pockets of creeks and rivers for painted browns, if I noticed a rocky face lingering behind, I could care less if my fly had been eaten. Just like waves that had once gifted me their rhythm, slapping time on the island, stony monoliths had me under a passionate spell. At the time, I had no indication of what type of rock stood before me. All that mattered to me was the fiery skin they bore, and the eagerness I had to burn myself on them.
With only crawling instinct to guide me, my time was soon spent scrambling in the canyons they populated. I came to know the faces as those of granite, which thrive in reefs high in alpine. My relationship with the rock has been almost solely based on intuition– day hikes led to sunset scrambles; scrambles led to a first pair of climbing shoes bought for fifteen dollars; and spring’s first days were spent falling into slush from overhangs above.
Days like those inspired a fearful joy. An electricity that makes my bones and tendons quiver. The thunder of plunging into gulf waters for the first time.
Many times, I have spied on the stone and believed it to be beautiful and smooth. And while granite is certainly charming, boasting quartz-lined faces– some kissed by the sun, others slobbered on, I thought it to be biting. Angry.
At a closer view, granite can be rough. Its edges shave my fingertips and grate sunburnt ankles, as if it to ward me off. And sometimes I feel given a test by the rock– one of strength, or just purely tolerance.
“Granite is too sharp,” I’d say.
“Granite needs time to be smooth.”
Yet, the sharpest rock has had the most time to smoothen. Its large grains have meant that it has spent more time than others to cool from its Precambrian sauna, before making its debut in volcanic uplift. Despite this, I have still found myself battling with my own perceptions of what Granite is– obtrusive, harsh, tacky.
Then, I think about the long drives back home, through Salida. The glares to the distance– a faraway land. The moments of stillness after the wind, where a brook trout would wiggle through my fingers, yet nothing existed except a young man and the scarlet buttresses that loomed over him.
This was the true love I had felt for the rock– something considered entirely inanimate, callous, and opposing– by me. It was the same passion a scrawling newborn had felt in his little heart on that sandy strip. The passion of a silent mind. The scratchy seaweed did not matter that day, nor did the sting of the salt in his eyes. He splashed.
Unfolding my mat underneath the blob of granite in routine, I think not of the bite of holds, the nip in my heel, but of splashing in the wind, sand, and stone. There is a bridging of mind and body that comes with this– a meditative aspect of splashing.
The connection does not appear from a certain space, but is always nearby, lingering in the galling gust and beloved breeze. This is the world– the sound and the touch of it; the rough and the smooth; the brittle, dry grains of sand and the sea that binds and loves them until they are sown together. This is my mind, a glass which the world may fill.
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