In league with the stones

Dear Teju,

Rocks are the roofs of a city we barely know. On a dry ridgetop at the end of a dry month, I find little under them but burrows leading deeper into the earth, a colony of ants frantic at the sudden inversion, and on the talus slope, more rocks: a puzzle that was put together wrong 8,000 years ago, but over the millenia has settled into its own kind of rightness. I follow a bear’s trail through the woods, marked by black cherry-pitted cairns of bear shit, & note the series of overturned rocks, flipped by an expert claw. Only a human, uneasy at the way our grotesque bodies no longer quite fit into the matrix, would ever return a flipped rock to its bed. Birds have nests, foxes have holes; culture is not a thing unique to humans. The song that makes the songbird must be taught. Instinct borrows always from improvisation — the true two-step. But watch a human child, too young to hunger for our made world’s humdrum El Dorados, playing in the creek with a stick — how she projects her dreams into the teeming, pulsing flow, how she punctuates & fabricates — & tell me this is not more wondrous than any gold, this human being!