Theme
11:10pm March 1, 2013
When I was in the hospital for my gastroparesis flare up, my friend bought me a piece of granite from the Sierras. Sierra granite has a special place in my heart, especially lying down on a huge flat granite mountainside smelling the sun on the granite and… every place I’ve done that has felt wonderful. My friend got it for beads, but we both somehow realized the granite doesn’t “want” to be beads, and still thinks of itself as a mountain. So I set it in my window sill and it seems happy there. (Yes, to me rocks are animate. To my friends, too. And we ll seem to read this rock the same way. Not as having human or animal desires, not anthropomorphism, just… Rockishness.) Anyway this is my new friend and it reminds me so much of the Sierras and solid sturdy things at a time when my body is all falling apart and messy. And the Sierras mean a lot to me, having spent a good deal of my early childhood exploring them. A piece of the Sierras is on my windowsill. I can pick it up and carry it around. It is heavy and feels good in my hand. It has little shiny pieces and smells just like granite. And things like that are really important when as far as the hospital is concerned, you’re a patient, sort of a number, depersonalized by the system even when you get the best doctors, nurses, and LNAs the hospital has to offer. They’re still swimming against the current to treat you as a person. And you need things that connect you to who you are. For me, for some reason, connections with places are the most intense. And Sierra granite, and Redwood Terrace, and anything that reminds me of these places, are like… I can’t even describe. A direct line to everything I love. Hospitals are horrible isolating places and this rock meant I was a little less isolated and disconnected.

When I was in the hospital for my gastroparesis flare up, my friend bought me a piece of granite from the Sierras. Sierra granite has a special place in my heart, especially lying down on a huge flat granite mountainside smelling the sun on the granite and… every place I’ve done that has felt wonderful.

My friend got it for beads, but we both somehow realized the granite doesn’t “want” to be beads, and still thinks of itself as a mountain. So I set it in my window sill and it seems happy there.

(Yes, to me rocks are animate. To my friends, too. And we ll seem to read this rock the same way. Not as having human or animal desires, not anthropomorphism, just… Rockishness.)

Anyway this is my new friend and it reminds me so much of the Sierras and solid sturdy things at a time when my body is all falling apart and messy. And the Sierras mean a lot to me, having spent a good deal of my early childhood exploring them.

A piece of the Sierras is on my windowsill. I can pick it up and carry it around. It is heavy and feels good in my hand. It has little shiny pieces and smells just like granite.

And things like that are really important when as far as the hospital is concerned, you’re a patient, sort of a number, depersonalized by the system even when you get the best doctors, nurses, and LNAs the hospital has to offer. They’re still swimming against the current to treat you as a person. And you need things that connect you to who you are.

For me, for some reason, connections with places are the most intense. And Sierra granite, and Redwood Terrace, and anything that reminds me of these places, are like… I can’t even describe. A direct line to everything I love.

Hospitals are horrible isolating places and this rock meant I was a little less isolated and disconnected.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this