I don’t know rocks, but I do appreciate stone and am forever finding marvelous pebbles.  I’ve started using them in plant pots to cover the exposed earth; it reduces evaporation and therefore watering, but just as importantly, it looks beautiful.  Sometimes when a particularly outstanding pebble is covered by the growing plant, I take it out and put it somewhere more visible.

But more seriously, perhaps where we find rocks less inaccessible to our nature is in our appreciation of mountains.  They may be physically less accessible, but in spirit, we seem to have enough of the mountainous element in us.

See also Thoreau’s comments on the softness of rocks as compared to hard-hearted men.

‘It is hard to know rocks.  They are crude and inaccessible to our nature.  We have not enough of the stony element in us.’  Thursday 31 March 1842

Source: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837-1861, Damion Searls (ed.), preface by John R. Stilgoe (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), p. 27

Photo credit: Deniz Altindas at unsplash