rocks

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet.

Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

...please don__ throw any more rocks at the barrier keeping the demonic hordes of the void from pouring over the world.

Meltwater (from the book Blue Bridge)Up here. A faceLoses its linesI look to seeThe colour of your eyes _They have turnedTo water.I lean forwardTo catchThe scent of your hair __ll I smell is heather.I touch your handAnd all I feel is earth and stones.There is nothing leftBut the hillside__ breastYour flesh and bonesHave vanished.

On the rocks of a bay so blue, it made her gray eyes glow.

The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.

She day-dreams just as I do. She is addicted to her solitude just as I am. She loves watching the rain-drops fall slowly on to the green leaves of an old guava tree just as I do. She loves drifting in time and time travel just as I do. She loves looking at the waves dashing against the rocks just as I do.

The thing about stereotyping is it's usually just throwing rocks into a crowd hoping to hit somebody who deserves it.

....it struck her that that perhaps everyone had the ability to see themselves in others. Even in the rocks. Even in the roses.

We may be floating on Tao, but there is nothing wrong with steering. If Tao is like a river, it is certainly good to know where the rocks are.