Rocks are good at waiting. They have got it pretty much covered. It is a function of their makeup, their composition. Nothing needs to happen for them, or to them, for great lengths of time. They can out-wait huge oak trees and giant redwoods. They can out last storms and floods and upheavals. They can put up with both the wear and tear of continuous activity, and the gnawing boredom of inactivity.
The Squire and his three friends were waiting. Not waiting for something to happen - just waiting. Apart from being heavy and having hardness and 'rocking' (as the Squire had reminded Rhonda) - 'waiting' was what rocks do!
So they waited.
Long before time can remember, rocks as we know them today, had no recognizable form at all. Somehow something happened, which even they cant explain, and they collectively made a quantum leap from a primeval state of non-being onto the stage of physicality and cosmic consciousness.
Before that, they were all just one big timeless swirl of gasses and molten minerals. They were the true mineral spirits. This was about 4.6 billion years ago, before the earths surface started to solidify. It was a big happening back then. It involved many things that can't be understood without metaphors and metaphysical ambiguities.
The time 'before time' was a very creative time. Everything was a solution. There were no problems, only a huge gassy liquid-mix of 'remedy'. As this solution 'cooled', the ingredients of raw potential solidified into what we understand to be the essential pre-historic building blocks of matter: which includes all the rock material on earth and throughout the universe.
The basic ingredients back then were silicon and oxygen and a smattering of other trace elements which had begun to consolidate into infinite configurations of something they had never been before. They turned from a kind of big swirling etherial 'problem solvent' into a more solid manifestation of spacial 'problem solvers'. The 'solution' had been mixed well and given time to 'set' properly, and the result was a massive deposit of multi-dimensional multipurpose matter which stratified into great chunks of raw creativity. The magma of all pre-history had actually congealed simply into - rocks. And so, in a way, rocks became visible tactile time-and-space evidence of all that had happened before time.
It was all so magnificent. It was all so magnanimous. It involved great extravagance and unanimity amongst all the united aggregations and throughout every geological state.
It also involved great restraint.
Any artist knows that you can't be 'creative' without limitations and constraints.
Creativity abhors a vacuum. It needs to have parameters to bounce off and complications to work with and try to reconfigure. These immutable preconditions are the catalyst which triggers new associations, and gives birth to new ideas.
Creative solutions almost always come out of necessity and restraint. And so it was that the 'essence of all creativity' formed itself into one massive mother-load of rock here on earth - a great hardened crystalized tumbled fractured mineralized conglomeration of 'constraint'.
After all, what other entity exercises more constraint than a rock? It is of necessity locked in time, locked in space, inert , silent , unyielding, hard, motionless and showing no emotion and seemingly without life.
