It seems like wherever I ride my mountain bike these days, this wonderful rock art seems to be springing up.
One day I’ll ride by and see a simple pile of four or five stones. In a few days, there’ll be a few more – as though it’s a sapling or a strange rocky mushroom. After a week or two it starts to get more complex, until eventually you get something fascinating like this which looks like the fairies have been up to mischief in the forest.
This phenomenon is wonderful on so many levels:
Unlike the Mona Lisa, this sort of art is vulnerable. If someone was malicious enough they could knock all the rocks down with impunity. But they don’t. I think this is because most people who go out in the forest on foot or on a bike are happy people. The happiest people on earth are those who get regular exercise doing something they enjoy. I doubt you’d get many spiteful souls walking in the forest. I doubt this sort of creation would last a day in a big city.
Even though it’s vulnerable, it’s beautiful. Not in a “Mona Lisa” way – but on a simpler level. Someone just grabbed a few stones lying around and stacked them. It probably took less than a minute. But the end result quietly says “I was here”. When someone adds to it, the stones say “I was here too”. After a few weeks, the mystical conglomerate seems to be chattering away saying “Hey – we were here too! Me too! And me! Woo – hoo isn’t this fun!”.
And eventually you have something created by dozens of people that has taken on an happy energy of its own.
As an experiment, why don’t you take a walk in a forest somewhere, stack up a few stones, and see what they grow into?
