Sunday, May 1, 2011

Soft Hands - Hard Rocks



Toads live dangerous lives. They seem to like hanging around piles of precariously stacked rocks and stones. I wonder - do they know how dangerous their surroundings are? Under a rock or squeezed somewhere in a crack one might stumble out while I am moving a big stone around and then half crawl half waddle off somewhere else in the pile. Such 'squooshiness' - so perilously close to all this heavy rock hardness. What a contrast!

Embodied in the toad is the message of vulnerability meeting necessity, or is it merely inevitability?

My hands are like toads, slipping in and around and between the finger-pinching, hand-crushing stones. They pry and tumble the rocks apart and manipulate them into position in a wall. Don't they know how dangerous this is? Flesh softness intermingled with stone hardness. And yet it just seems to be the nature of things.