“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery~

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about journeys and symbols we use to mark our places along the way, to say perhaps, “I was here” or to mark the path for travelers and pilgrims behind us.  Building a cairn is at once a meditation and an exercise in patience and trust.

Gathering the rocks we’ve collected along the way-getting in touch with their very nature as we work gently to stack them in a way that both honors their shape and how that shape is meant to support the rock on top and beneath.  Playing with them, stacking and taking apart until the balance is just right.  Sort of how we take the components of our own lives- the bits and pieces  of emotions and energies, joys and sorrows that don’t always seem to fit together  but somehow we emerge standing stronger than it would seem possible.

I have a little cairn just outside my front door.  They are rocks I collected from a favorite beach on Cape Cod.  They stand just so through the seasons and only come apart when my grandsons visit and take it apart but I don’t mind.  Sometimes Matthew especially will play with them awhile and put them back together in a different way.  Sometimes I sit on the steps after they have gone home and hold them in my hand for awhile and offer a prayer of gratitude for a place, a person, a memory that took me one little step further in my journey to wisdom, wholeness and healing.  They never go back together in exactly the same way but somehow they stand together as a reminder to me that there is always another way to be.