Outside The Box

In the woods beyond the kitchen window there is a stump which lost its tree soon after the house was built. We intended minimal clearing of the land but in the new light of the opened space, this tree and a few others revealed more menace in their lean than a body likes to sleep under. Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.

The stump is a survivor. All the others which gave up their crowns for safety and firewood have long since returned to the soil, but this one is crowned with a flat rock. I vaguely remember putting the rock there, composed of quartz and probably possessed of a shape or sparkle that caught my eye. Left there and forgotten, it became a hedge against the elements, and now the old stump and its metamorphic crown remind me of the mesas and balanced rocks of the American west, where erosion has removed softer sediment from around that which is under the harder caprock.

It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for this land that sustains us, which we in turn have labored to preserve for future generations. I have been asked many times why we didn’t develop our property, choosing instead to establish a conservation easement. “You could have made a lot of money.” The answer, as I have come to understand it, is because we are that rock, not by a long shot the Greek Petros or Aramaic Kefa upon which Christ built his churh. Not the foundation upon which the wise person builds their house. Not even the celebrity wrestler-turned-actor (whose movies I do enjoy). Rather, we are the rock that preserves the wood.

It’s something of a family tradition. Like many families who have deep roots here, ours had a tendency to be “land poor.” They were not often flush with cash, but managed to accumulate land when it was cheap and abundant, and they held on to it. The stumps survived despite the pressures of erosion around them.

Those pressures were considerable. As far back as our family history is remembered, greedy hands coveted the land, first for its resources, and later for division and digestion. That history includes stolen timber, disappearing deeds and boundary markers, deception and legal sleight-of-hand. One rogue who had ingress and egress over my grandfather’s private road even hired a bulldozer to widen it because he thought Pa was too old to stop him. (He was mistaken.)

As early as the 1970’s my grandfather would say, “One day rich men will fight each other over these mountaintops, but don’t begrudge them that fight, because that’s as close to heaven as most of them will ever get.” He saw the future, and knowing that some of the land would likely be sold to pay for the needs of his wife of 70 years, he carefully drew up the plats to minimize development potential, the rock covering the stump.

You can carry the metaphor even farther if you seek to understand the nature of some of the most annoying of the things that divide people, even in a nation like ours where the vast majority share a great deal of the same cultural heritage and life experience, yet seem so often as divided as left and right. Succinctly stated, the conservative impulse is the rock; the liberal is the weathering.

Don’t get trapped by the words. No one wants a forest of preserved stumps. Conversely, no one wants the weather to wash away all the topsoil. When it comes to the land, conservatives, having a number of developers in their ranks, rather than conserving it have an annoying habit of causing more erosion. Liberals often want to conserve it so well that even people can’t use it. Both viewpoints are representative of natural processes. Life itself requires taking a stand, so to speak. At the most fundamental level of our living bodies, a cell requires a cell wall. But life is dynamic, constantly changing. A tree begins to die when it stops growing.

So in reality, I am not just the rock, but the rock AND the stump. My existence is limited by, but also sustained by the boundaries within which it is contained. Go ahead and tell me that you’re a conservative or a liberal. You’re actually both, or you wouldn’t be alive to enjoy the luxury of an opinion. To think otherwise is to think, shall we say, like a box of rocks. Lest we forget, we’re here to think outside that box.

A purely conservative species of humans would still be living in caves, and a purely liberal species would have died out long ago, eaten by cave bears trying to feed their cubs. None of this is intended to move your opinion in any direction whatsoever. Whichever way you lean, nature leans the same way, in its own time and for its own purposes. Perhaps in realizing this fundamental aspect of creation, from the photon which is both a “solid” particle and a changing wave, to the super massive black hole that destroys stars while it creates new ones, we might lose the need to be offended when someone leans in a different direction than we lean.