Early this summer on a Saturday morning, Miller had a Bat Mitzvah service to attend up in Potomac, a neighborhood northwest of Bethesda. I dropped him off and drove to nearby Carderock, a favorite 'natural area' destination of mine. Occasionally I will walk some small portion of the Billy Goat Trail along the sometimes mighty, sometimes docile Potomac river.
However, this time I felt drawn instead to the considerable rock outcroppings. There were at least two climbers out with ropes and harnesses. The morning was cool and clear. I set down my cane, and 'bouldered' up to something of a ledge, perhaps chest high from the trail, and sat, legs crossed. I was out of view of the climbers, though their voices drifted over me. "Belay on," said one woman's voice, then "on belay" came her companion's reply. Then just their chatting - softer than the climbing calls. The rope they were using was anchored on my side of the massive dark gray rock face.
A few hikers passed right in front of me, their tongue foreign - maybe Dutch. Did they ask, 'what's with the old gray Buddha?' Very doubtful they would. In my world travels, it often seemed that only Americans would assume that nobody understands them and say such dorky things out loud, right in front of people. (However, one technical caveat must be remembered, namely, that I am able to understand at most German, Nepali, and the various dialects of English.) And it is assuredly a rather harsh observation, one I remember having as a young man in Germany: taking pride as I'd blend in with language, dress, and the mannerisms of the modern Teuton; and cringing at the midwestern tourists talking in the U-bahn about what? - the 'stupid conductor?' - or some other such inanity. Over half a lifetime ago. I should know better by now: insensitive dorks aren't just American, they come in all nationalities! Ba dump bump. No, the wisdom of years seems to be that people aren't so easily defined by stereotypes. That these stereotypes aren't solid as rock.
Sitting for some minutes, eyes closed, a cool breeze, no mosquitos or bugs of any kind - a minor miracle. The voices of the two climbers. And then falling into the memory of lying on top of a similar promontory high above 'Deep Creep' in Running Springs, a small resort town where my family lived for a couple years in the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California. A place where friends and I - age ten - would fish, swim, climb, skip rocks - boy stuff. Or sometimes I would go there alone, and having swum in the pool below, climb up, lay my skinny belly on the wide smooth boulder and dry off.
That rock, this rock, several lifetimes ago. These rocks seem so ageless and timeless, but I've heard that the terrestrial variety aren't really so very old. Moon rocks, for instance, can be over a billion years old. The rocks we climb on, or collect and save on top of our dressers - these are relative newbies, having been heaved up from volcanoes, eroded, crushed a few million years, and metamorphosed many times again before we come to see them. Rest on them. Hold them.
What do we really see in them? Are we looking into and feeling that timelessness we all carry, our Buddha nature, our grace of God, our Allahu akbar?
Rock of ages, cleft for me...we are stardust, we are golden.
