Rocks
My mother (who turned 51 on Monday) shaved her head last month. Then she packed up her Mazda 323 and left her Bainbridge Island home to go on a two month road trip alone through the Southwest. She’s hiking in Idaho, camping in Utah, communing with the trees in California.

I’m her primary contact person, and so she calls me once a week just to check in, let me know she’s alive and fill me in on the latest. After last Tuesday’s attack, I felt the need to call her and leave a message on her cell phone, even though she was hiking and wouldn’t get it for a few days.

“Mom, it’s me,” I started. “Um, I’m not sure if you’ll get this message before you see a newspaper, but some awful things have happened today. There were terrorist attacks on both the World Trade Center towers in New York, and the Pentagon.”

“It could be the beginning of something real bad,” I finished lamely.

She called me a couple days later, told me that some hikers she’d run into on the trail had given her the news. We started to talk over what had happened. First, know this about my mother: everything is an archetype, and it somehow all relates to the seasons and elements.

When I asked her what she thought the longterm outlook was, she said “Well Air, I’ve been talking to the rocks here in Utah…”

Wait, I thought, she didn’t just say she’d been talking to rocks, did she?

“And the rocks reminded me that human civilizations have run though countless cycles of power and destruction,” –She did say rocks, I thought.– “And that we may be moving out of the powerful time of our little civilization. This may be a shift out of excess into the destruction part of the cycle.”

Yes, my mother talks to rocks. But sometimes I think the rocks are smarter than me.