A story about trusting the counsel of rocks and other things older and wiser than you.
Some evenings, the world feels too loud for language.
Emails multiply like rats, the news mutates into performance art, and even well-meaning people suddenly require more emotional bandwidth than the average small-town power grid can provide.
On those nights, I go to the grandfathers.
They’re just stones — actual stones, not metaphors — sitting in a wooden bowl on my desk.
They’re not that big. None are particularly impressive.
Just weathered stones who remember more about gravity than I ever will.
Tonight, after a weekend of puzzles and naps and the brief mercy of forgetting myself, I returned to the council. I didn’t come for answers. I came to listen to the silence.
One by one, I set them out.
1. The First Grandfather: The Mottled Oval
The Keeper of Relationships (and Overrelationships)
Warm in the hand, smooth from years of river logic, mottled in the way only stones that have survived both fire and water are mottled. Rust and grey, history and forgetting.
When I held him, something opened — that sense of being rich in relationships, threaded into a vast, living web. A torrent of names, the ones I say every day, the unexpected ones, the new ones, the enduring ones. A flood of belonging.
And then, just as quickly, the overwhelm:
Oh right. Those relationships come with inboxes. And expectations. And some frayed edges. And schedules. And the occasional emotional downpour.
He snapped at me — not angrily, just sharply, like one stone striking another in the current to say, simply, listen!
“Love as a river loves,” he said— “broad and steady, but faithful to your course.
A river that gives too much becomes a flood.
A river that knows itself feeds a valley.”
So I put him down.
2. The Moon-Pocked Stone
Bearer of Grief and Other Inconvenient Clarities
Cratered and scarred, like something that’s been hurtling through space for eons.
I can’t remember what he held last time — only that he holds it still.
Grief for a world hurtling toward its own forgetting.
Grief for the delusion of separation.
Grief for the way we cling to myths long after their “best by” dates.
He doesn’t speak.
He just sits there, behind the ribs.
A whisper I barely caught:
“Clarity is often indistinguishable from sorrow.
Disillusionment isn’t the end of innocence.
It’s the beginning of insight.”
There is a grace in there — but it is sharp. Raw. Not the kind of thing you see in cross-stich in a frame.
3 & 4. The Black Twins
Guardians of Belonging and Boundaries (and All the Weirdness in Between)
Two smooth black stones with faint marbling, eternally in conversation with each other. Tonight they balanced precariously, one on the other, until they toppled and had to be rebuilt — as if to make a point.
They carry my oldest stories:
- that childhood moment of walking into a room full of uniforms and feeling my body say no.
- The group projects where being eager made me suspect.
- The long apprenticeship in being both needed and resented.
- The shape-shift required to survive.
These two know that lifelong tension:
the desire to belong versus the fear of disappearing.
When they fell, it felt like truth.
When I balanced them again, it felt like practice.
They whispered:
“Belonging isn’t a place. It’s a posture.
Keep rebalancing.
That is all any creature has ever done.”
Annoyingly wise, these two.
5. Fool’s Gold
The Seducer of Maps, Patterns, and Grand Plans
A glittering stone, shimmering with possibility and delusion in equal measure. Real? Fake? Maybe a real fake.
It glints in ways that feel like guidance and delusion at the same time.
Mapping networks. Mapping systems. Mapping the organs of a living body. All the shimmering thoughts that promise coherence but may only reflect my own longing.
He didn’t say anything — he shimmered.
“Not everything that glitters is guidance,” he seemed to say.
“But sometimes it is.
Good luck.”
I appreciate the honest ambiguity.
6. Granite
The Medic / The One Who Actually Helps
Heavy. Unbeautiful. Exactly right.
I pressed him to my temples, the way I always do.
A small exorcism of headache and worry.
A reminder that the body is real and the mind is mostly vapor.
He is the elder who doesn’t speak in metaphor.
He simply draws heat out of the places where thought has been burning too hot.
His wisdom is older than philosophy:
“Touch stone,” he said.
“Let it quiet you.
Start with the body or don’t bother.”
Amen.
7. The Plus-One: The Perched Stone
Trickster, Balancer, Patron Saint of Precarious Times
One stone balanced impossibly on another. Defying physics. Defying propriety.
The stone equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
The precariousness is the point.
The world rests like this too — not stable. Wobbly, and still somehow majestic.
This grandfather teaches the only universal law:
Everything falls.
Everything is rebuilt.
Rude, but fair.
What the Council Said (without saying it)
When I stepped back, the stones had arranged themselves into a quiet constellation:
- Relationship.
- Grief.
- Belonging.
- Illusion.
- Grounding.
- Balance.
The message wasn’t profound so much as practical:
“You don’t have to carry all of it.
You only have to listen.
And when it becomes too much: come back, touch stone.”
There was a hint — barely a trace — of something else in their counsel tonight.
Something like grace, but rough, unpolished, and not yet named.
The kind you only notice after the illusions have all burned away
and the world is smaller, truer, and strangely more tender for it.
Closing
The stones have spoken their quiet truth.
Tomorrow, the work begins again.
But not the same work —
and not with the same hands.