Stone Renga

I used to live in a place with no stones. Well, not exactly. There were stones that had been crushed by waves into ultra tiny pieces of sand that in this usually dry place was hard to dig up. It was also hard to grow any garden plants unless you used raised beds. I was so lonesome for stones I drove my pickup into the Texas hill country and loaded fairly large boulders out of a stream bed to carry back home and place around the yard. These days I might get arrested for stealing property. It's getting stylish to have boulders in your front yard, especially if you live on a corner. About twenty-five miles away was an area with a lot of petrified wood. I have one piece on my altar and one outside on the front porch. I moved them with me when I moved away from the rockless place. I mention all this to emphasize how we humans are attached to stones, but we don't think much about it. Our first houses were caves probably. Out first cutting tools were sharp rocks. Our kidney's can even make stones. This book is so great because it brings to the fore our love and our dependence on stones. Rock along here, on a good read that is an individualistic American riff on the Japanese form of the Renga.