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STONE LESSONS

Another weekend addressing THE WALL TASK, at least in part. It's somewhat like going to the dentist: a little bit at a time. I realize that what I'm trying to learn is not HOW TO BUILD A STONE WALL or HOW TO MAKE ROCKS FIT TOGETHER or HOW TO FIND ROCKS THAT FIT TOGETHER ALREADY (the latter is not generally in rocks' nature once they've gone their separate ways), but to share in some fundamental understanding that rocks already possess, and everywhere and always embody quite successfully, but of which I have little inkling as yet, owing to the softness of my being and the nature of my education, my syncretistic abilities being in the abstract, rather than in the igneous, metamorphic or sedimentary.
I have to go and stare at a stone wall masterpiece for a long long time (thank goodness there are lots of those around; Japanese stone builders are equalled only by the Maya) and let it sink in, then begin slowly to pile stone upon stone in a kind of stony grammar, a petrosyntax, in hopes of creating a stylistically masterful drama of epic proportions big enough to embrace my herb garden.
I seek to build it one way, and in learning I cannot do it that way (the rocks will not stand for it, they have their scruples, after all; rocks are not constrained by logic; they understand a much greater fundamental than we humans do), I learn some small thing that only rocks can teach; I focus on that and build...no, that will not do either; that is not the whole of the thing, only a part. Rocks know it cannot all be learned at once, and wisely do not crowd me with knowledge.
But with that part I go on, and try again, and fail again, but when, after a week away I come back to the task, I find I have learned another little bit, it too is now part of me, part of what I know about stones and stone walls, part of what the stones in their limitless patience embody. With that I go on again, begin to build, and fail, and learn another thing, and so it goes on, as bit by bit what I learn rises up like a stone wall. And when that learning wall is at last all learned, it will be but a slight step to build the wall itself.
If I want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, I have to learn the bit-by-bit stones teach me until at last I have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a Bob wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.