If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone.

Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock.

Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain.

Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute assurance that time can grind down even the heaviest boulder, smooth even the sharpest edge.

Rising forty feet above the rocky cliffs of Carmel is a great poem of gravity and granite that Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887–January 20, 1962), poet laureate of the co-creation of time and mind, composed with his wife Una and their twin sons.

A decade before Carl Jung built his famous stone tower in Zurich and conceptualized the realized self as an elemental stone, Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stonemason to build Tor House and Hawk Tower. As this rocky planet was being unworlded by its first world war, he set about making “stone love stone.”

Seeing stonecutters as “foredefeated challengers of oblivion” and poets as stonecutters of the psyche, he went on hauling enormous slabs of granite up from the shore, carrying time itself, cupping its twelve consolations in his mortal hands, writing about what he touched and what touched him.

OH, LOVELY ROCK
by Robinson Jeffers

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.
The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,
Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts
Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.

             We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth.
Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves
On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame
Lighted my sleeping son’s face and his companion’s, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall
Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire’s breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall
That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it,
Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock…as if I were
Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily
And living rock. Nothing strange… I cannot
Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on
Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys
Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die,
And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies
That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago,
Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.

A generation later, another great poet displaced from the bedrock of belonging by another world war tried to make sense of being human by turning to stone:

STONE
by Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river,
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed.
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill —
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star charts
On the inner walls.

And although we are “creatures shaped by the planet’s rocky logic,” we are also creatures shaped by the myriad mercies of time, saved over and over by the leap beyond logic that is trusting time.

FORGIVENESS
by Maria Popova

May the tide
never tire of its tender toil
how over and over
it forgives the Moon
the daily exile
and returns to turn
mountains into sand
         as if to say,
you too can have
this homecoming
you too possess
this elemental power
of turning
the stone in the heart
into golden dust.