The rock was here, mixed in with thousands of other rocks in the gravel driveway, when the house was built in ’59. It was here when my dad bought the house in 1968, a big house with a big pool in the nicest part of town. Our neighbors were all doctors and bankers; quite an improvement from the tiny duplex in the north end of town where we lived while dad was in ‘Nam. I just noticed the rock today, in the same driveway, 66 years after it first landed here.

It’s a shiny piece of milky quartz, about 2 1/2 inches long and an inch-and-a-half wide; a pretty little rock that the sun brought to my attention as the wind finally moved enough dirt to expose it.

This rock is, of course, much older than the house or the town or people. Older, even than the mountains you can see today. About 100 million years ago, a crystal of liquid silicon dioxide bubbled up from the earth’s mantle and slowly cooled, picking up some iron that gives the rock its many shades of pink.

And now, a tenth of a billion years later, this little crystal landed in my driveway and has interacted with my consciousness.

Why write about a rock? By itself, a rock is a relatively unremarkable artifact that rarely rises to the level of significance on the radar of our attention. For a rock to matter, we have to assign meaning to it.

Just like our lives.

The house and I are old now, worn and a bit decrepit but mostly in good repair. We are still able to accomplish what we came here to do.

The stories we can tell! The house has given shelter to five generations of our family. My grandmother moved in with us when it was better for her to not be alone anymore, a few years after my grandpa passed in ‘64. My parents moved here when I was 10, and later, my oldest son and his wife brought my first grandchild into the world when they lived here.

I was standing near the rock in my driveway when I met my best friend at the time. We were comparing bicycles; his family had moved in two houses down shortly before we got here. He was six months older than me, about to turn 11. We were inseparable, sharing experiences and processing the world as we grew up in our isolated little desert town.

We explored the universe in our plywood shipping container spaceship. We formed a band and discovered a mutual love for music that would come to sustain us for the rest of our lives. We contemplated the onrush of high school and shortly thereafter (even though it seemed an eternity to us, then) attended that high school.

In those last years before adulthood, we explored caves both natural and left behind by goldrush miners in the late 1800s. We learned how to shoot in the desert, had our first girlfriends, our first breakups and experienced the first deaths of kids our age.

But we were immortal for a while, preserved in the now of mindfulness that comes when you are fully immersed in life.

More than 50 years ago we took a picture of our band, standing near the rock that had not yet come to my attention. In the picture we are young and strong and clearly invincible. Frozen in time in the grainy Polaroid, we are smiling broadly and holding our instruments like the weapons of freedom that they truly were.

We stood right about where the rock lay and discussed 2001: A Space Odyssey which we had just seen at the local movie theater. We did the math and wondered if we would actually be around in 2001, which was nearly a quarter of a century ago, now.

Another picture, clearer and probably taken by my dad, shows my forever one-and-only girlfriend - the first of many - holding one of my sister’s cats. Based on where everything is in the picture, she must have been standing directly on top of the rock.

Just as my parents were, waving, as I drove away with my tiny U-Haul trailer behind my 1970 Chevy to go to college out of state. The band was disbanded, the girlfriend(s) long gone, my friends scattered to jobs and military service and other colleges. It was one of the very few times I saw my father cry.

I had just married my forever one-and-only wife - the first of a few - and was finally escaping the tiny town that had been the primary locus of my existence until that moment in time.

Then came three careers, five college degrees, world travel; rags and riches. More wives and additional children came along, one of whom has added two grandchildren to the family, so far. I still visited my little home town on a regular and frequent basis in the 40-plus years that I didn’t live here full time. I flew myself up from the big city that was now my home, for birthdays and school events and holidays. Christmas was special here until my kids (and their kids) moved away.

I took my dad to see his last Fourth of July fireworks at the fairgrounds. I came back to help care for him and for his funeral when the brain cancer took him. I never will go watch the fireworks there again.

As the decades passed, the house and I lost my grandmother, and my mom and many of my friends who used to frequent there. And for each event, I passed right over the ancient rock that observed everything from its place in the driveway gravel but never said a word.

The balance in the town of good and evil, happy and sad was by this time heavily biased toward the negative and I was glad that I never had to go back. Until I did.

After what might be conveniently termed a “series of unfortunate events,” I am back in the little desert town next to the mountains now for the better part of a decade. The nicest part of town isn’t, anymore, and some of the inhabitants betrayed the gift of shelter offered by the old house and gravely injured it.

My Husky, Logan and I are the sole occupants of the family home now and I will admit that it gets very quiet and very dark more often than not. But as this most recent stint of desert dwelling has progressed, a most remarkable change has occurred.

The sadness indelibly geocached here has given way to acceptance; the loss of so many, gracefully reconciled. I have reassigned the sense of purpose that I feared lost and I can look beyond the scorching isolation of this place to see the impossibly beautiful mountains just to the west and beyond them a bit, the sea.

The battle to recalibrate my mindset was tortuous and bloodied, but the most hard-fought conflicts sometimes bring the greatest peace. I have added new friends to stand in for those long gone (never to be replaced) and built community to overthrow isolation. The psychic stench of death has given way to the sweet aroma of petrichor and wet sage in the infrequent desert monsoon rain.

Gratitude was the primum mobile in this transformation. Logan and I explore the desert on our own time and as we see fit. I give back to this community that has seen so much of my life and I am forging significant new relationships.

I visit my children - and their children - when I please and relish every quiet mile of the journey to see them. I am thankful for friends I have known since I started high school here and young friends who are just beginning their own adventure at the same school. I am grateful for whatever wisdom I have gained during my many years of consciousness and for the ineffable gift of consciousness itself.

I find great joy in my attempts to share whatever nuggets of wisdom as may assist others; this includes you, dear readers. This has become the purpose I have chosen for my existence.

And the meaning I have assigned to the little piece of quartz that has been my silent and unseen companion for a lifetime - that now proudly resides on my writing desk - is that of a reminder: that beauty and love are still and always able to transform us.



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- JWW