What can we learn from hanging out with rocks?
Shared by AFFRICA TAYLOR
What can we learn from hanging out with rocks? My grandkids and I spend quite a lot of time hanging out with rocks in the gorge. They like to collect the soft mudstones and grind them into powder, and to climb their favourite boulder. Pressing their bodies against its hard mass, they manoeuvre its rough surfaces, cracks and crevices with their hands and feet, often scraping their skin and dislodging its loose pebbles and lichen as they pull themselves to the top. It’s a routine and mutually-abrasive choreography. I like to contemplate this rocky gorge’s deep geological history of movement and friction. Its extrusive Silurian bedrock is thought to have been deposited here by a volcanic eruption some 450 million years ago and subsequently uplifted in major faultline seismic events, creating mountains and the gorge. Over time, large sections of rock have weathered, split away from the cliffs, and plummeted down into the creek bed. Aided by the force of the water surging through the narrow gorge some of these boulders have tumbled even further downstream.
Most of us schooled in Cartesian subject-object dualisms regard rocks as those solid but inert objects that provide the firm foundations upon which our dynamics lives on earth take place. But my times hanging out with rocks have given me a very different perspective. I’m captivated by how they are continually on the move – shifting, eroding, recomposing and changing form through their interactions with other geo/bio forces – but on a very different scale and temporality to our own movements. In this precipitous time of earth systems destabilisations, triggered by human greed and delusions of dominion, what do rocks have to teach us about the elemental forces of change? How might the dynamism of rocks put us back in our place and alert us to the limits of the human imaginary? And returning to familiar professional grounds, what can we learn from rocky relations about the seismic forces needed to shift the epistemological bedrock of education’s Cartesian foundations? But that is a question for another blog.