FOR THE LOVE OF ROCKS

My post this week is a bit behind, and also a little off the wall, but I hope you enjoy it.

I'm a little bit of a rock hound and love looking for agates in particular, and other rocks that are just plain pretty, or have fossils in them or something cool.  Wisconsin, or least the area where I live, does not have many fossils.  Sometimes we have to be creative when we find a rock that catches our eye in these parts.  When I'm out exploring nature wherever I might be,  I tend to pause and study rocks at my feet as well.  It's a habit that started when I was very young, inherited from my father's side of the fence.

Here's a story that came to me the other night, while I couldn't sleep, thinking about the rock with the face on it that I found the other day at home.  This rock is just a little smaller than a golf ball. 

"A Native American Lady, "dubbed with affection by her tribe as, "Woman Who Wastes Time Looking", was gathering clams one late summer day nearly seven hundred years ago, in a small stream not far from her abode, when she found a rock in the ripples of a shallow place with the sun shining upon it. As she placed the rock in her hand, noticing what she thought was an aged face, wrinkled from the sun, she heard a story in her head. The story follows...

Many years ago you may recall hearing about the time in late summer when your great grandmother, "Lightfoot", left your camp to look for the delicious sweet tooth mushrooms everyone prized as an ingredient to her soups and partridge stews. She had found the apricot colored mushrooms before, in a special place on an oak knoll, but this time, Lightfoot, on her journey alone, never returned home.

"Woman Who Wastes Time" gazed at the stone clutched in her palm and the story came to her about the woman she barely remembered, as she was just a young child when this happened. When Grandmother spoke to her, inside her head, in an aged but somewhat familiar voice, she said, "Never stop looking for small treasures from Mother Earth that delight you, no matter what others say... like small pebbles from the earth, feathers from the sky, shed antlers from the deer, and little things that no one else takes time to see." "When I left you, my journey was not wasted, I found the sweet tooth. My feet wouldn't let me make it back home, but my mind and heart are always with you."