The Lonsdale Arch Workshop

The four day Lonsdale Arch Workshop held from June 14 to 17 got off to a rocky start but ended up being a wonderful experience. 

End of day One was hot hot hot in the sun. The wall had begun. 

Day Twosday was Choosy Tuesday. We were all looking for that 'right' stone. Always looking over what's 'left' in the pile we hadn't used yet. Remembering the three truths of zen helps - 'Everything Is Connected , Everything Changes and Pay Attention.

Day three seemed like hump-day, up and over day. It was Wednesday. When's the day we finish ? Tomorrow !

Through's day. Thursday was Closure Day. We were all Arch friends by then . Happy students . Tired teachers. The stones had their way with us !

One of our more successful 'fishing' expeditions we took each day to look for more stones

We also took a field trip to see Ron's (one of the students) property and his garden stonework including his neolithic-looking table and take time to take a group shelfy .   Notice the dopplegangster bookends. 

Gravity is weigh less in the Moongate

 

Stretching It

  Although the July 30th to the Aug 1st two day weekend workshop at Sweet Life Farm stretched out to be a three day event for some of us, it was a totally enjoyable learning experience. Thirteen students and two instructors made use of the surprisingly good weather that the weatherman hadn't predicted, to produce this lovely 40 foot 'stretch' of wall to continue the line of dry stone we had started two years ago at the farm.

   Stones were gathered from the existing nearby hedgerow and reassembled into an amazing array of tidiness and beauty. Above you can see Jeff and Craig, and Jeff and Craig leaning on the wall after the second day of building.

  The wall was finished on the third day and copes added from the selection of leftover stones found further down the old hedgerow. Thank you Larry M for digging so many of these big stones out from the underbrush for us to use.

And thank you Mary for all the email and admin work getting the event organized to run smoothly.

  

Judy and Mary

Thank you too Judy for hosting this magnificent event with such great food from your abundant garden, and the cozy accommodation and evening entertainment, including walling stretches, music and libations

Ankle breaking celebration after competing day one of the workshop

Stimulating teaching by the inimitable Mark Ricard

Heartfelt hearting experts

Yoffi hard at work.

Another Sweet Life Wall is born

 

Curve Appeal

 Curve appeal?  Pitching and contouring the granite surface to look like bedrock( Bendrock ?) for the new parking area.

Baby Canada Geese on Victoria Day

 

Towing My Cocoon Stone .

,

My home is never more than a stone‘s tow away. I have made myself a rockreational trailer. It’s not a TraveLite that’s for sure.It’s not a new fangled mortarhome either. It’s more like the Rockwood brand, but without the wood. 

I call it The Cozy Cocoon. It’s made entirely of heavy duty long lasting stones. It has a two and a half foot high circular door opening that leads to a spacious compartment with a six foot, dry-laid, vaulted ceiling. It has surprisingly good ventilation and yet has a very quiet feel to it when you’re  inside. It travels smoothly when I drive carefully but when I tow it fast it’s got a lot of pick up.

I’m looking forward to going on a camping adventure with it soon. It will be exciting to travel down the old dusty cobblestone trail by day, and sleep ‘inside’ my cobblestone trailer by night . And when I’ll pull over late at night I’ll climb into my mobile dry stone home and sleep like a rock. And when I wake up and crawl out I’ll find myself somewhere I’ve never been before , feeling like a totally new person.          

Think Bolder

 .

It's good to try to think about the plight of our friend the boulder 

It sits around on its own all day, and just gets older 

Alone it's waits so sedentary on the lawn 

Abandoned helpless and forlorn 

Why not have it joined with it's peers, 

and all its younger smaller kin

And in a circle of harmony and oneness,

invite the different sizes in ?

Keep your eyes on the road

 .

,

Welcoming travellers on the busy 401 highway to the Port Hope area (which has many beautiful dry stone walls and historic brick and stone buildings) is this sign with an example of phoney stonework, which is made, not of brick or stone, but manufactured blocks , but not real blocks , but rather, a photo of blocks, the image being made out of some sort of plasticated vinyl material .

Problem or Problem Solver?

 ...

 

When we’re searching in a random pile of stones for good ones to build walls with, we sometimes come across unusual rocks that have weird crazy shapes. We've learned to carefully put them aside because, though they look like ‘problems’, they more than likely will turn out to be ‘problem solvers’. It’s magical how often they end up fitting ‘perfectly’ in some troublesome space we thought was going to be impossible to fill. To decide an awkward shaped stone is a problem, is like looking up in the sky and not seeing a silver lining but just a troublesome dark cloud.

May 1st 2021 World Naked Gardening Day

After a nice day of gardening in the buff, wouldn't it be great to take a hot outdoor shower in the garden too, surrounded, of course, by undressed stones.

 

Three Points on Balance

.

Ultimately, a stone stays ‘balanced’ because it makes contact, not with one, but at least three unique points with the stone below.

These are often infinitesimal 'points' of contact, too small to see, but nevertheless, real. They form a kind of tiny tripod. If there were only two points of contact, the stone on top would fall away.

The dynamic of the tripod configuration creates a magical thing called balance.

Eventually, after an imposed time of being separated from each other, and undergoing a regime of isolation, we too, as a species (if we are not to fall completely off the planet) will need to establish contact again. 

I’m not even sure it’s right to say ‘again’. There’s no indication humans in the past found the kind of balance we are all going to need after what looks like a long period of separation . 

But I suggest there are at least three ‘touch points’ we will need to find when we come out of isolation.

Hopefully when we emerge from our exile there will be a yearning for a totally new kind of social contact.

And we’ll all be willing to create something more dynamic than the artificial glues, toxic cements and manufactured fasteners that we were content to use before. Three important points of contact of this new ‘balanced’ contact, will be emotional, physical, but more especially, metaphysical.

We, like lonely boulders will find ourselves in families.

The discarded piles of stones will come together and discover order and purpose.

The precious shaped buried stones will be unearthed and cherished.

We, like well-placed stones in a garden wall, will no longer be sporadically dotted around indiscriminately.

There will be a pattern of touching, totally different from the self-centred configurations of ‘pointlessness’ we have for too long pretended to be ‘balanced’ in the past.

Balance is not for quitters. (View web version)

 

Metamorphosis

And I dreamt I saw the boulders being bulldozed in the ground, and they were turning into butterflies beyond our imagination. 

Many of us who work with stone would concur that the expectation that we are due for some sort of mega-metamorphic rock-the-world event, is merely the evidence of the beginnings of a long awaited 'emergence', and that rocks, as in previous stone ages, have a rather big part to play in this cosmic phase shift.

The Butterfly Effect

The splitting of hard rocks that are not good or useful enough (we call them caterpillar rocks) - too round mostly, or too thick or are not flat enough, often creates pleasing symmetric shaped stones reminiscent of the paired wing patterns of the insect world.  We call this metamorphosis of lowly rocks into beautiful useful stones - the butterfly effect .  

Our stone system

The earth is really just another rock in the wall, suspended like the other planets, within a system held together by gravity. It’s a system, like a dry laid one, where the right amount of space is needed everywhere to make the thing work. If the stones are too close the system collapses into itself, and ceases to be, like a black hole. If the stones are too far apart, the thing falls apart.

We are reminded that there is no Planet B, and, in the bigger picture, there really is no ‘System B’ that doesn’t use gravity . We are held together in this wall of space and time, and to imagine we can find a substitute way of gluing or welding or compacting the whole thing together is to embark on a planetary error.

It is not a closed system however. The openings and cracks in the wall (troublesome as they are) are there to let the light in. The sun is the biggest ‘opening’. It’s luminosity allows us to behold, and be held in, the planetary pattern of things. All the planets allow for reflection too. They’re all part of the system.

There is always a ‘pattern’ in every good system, as there is in every good wall. But there can be many different patterns possible - Pattern B, and C or D and so on. The pattern depends on the type of rock and the shapes they come in. There may be no ‘perfect’ rocks, or rock shapes  (or planets, for that matter)  but there will always be many perfectly good choices.

Our planet fits nicely into the system, right where it is. It holds up its part. It doesn’t take up too much space and it doesn’t block the light.

It’s a good system. 

It’s a good pattern of choices

Precious Points of Contact

Ultimately, a stone stays ‘balanced’ because it makes contact, not with one, but at least three unique points with the stone below.

These are often infinitesimal 'points' of contact, too small to see, but nevertheless, real. They form a kind of tiny tripod. If there were only two points of contact, the stone on top would fall away.

The dynamic of the tripod configuration creates a magical thing called balance.

Eventually, after an imposed time of being separated from each other, and undergoing a regime of isolation, we too, as a species (if we are not to fall completely off the planet) will need to establish contact again. 

I’m not even sure it’s right to say ‘again’. There’s no indication humans in the past found the kind of balance we are all going to need after what looks like a long period of separation . 

But I suggest there are at least three ‘touch points’ we will need to find when we come out of isolation.

Hopefully when we emerge from our exile there will be a yearning for a totally new kind of social contact.

And we’ll all be willing to create something more dynamic than the artificial glues, toxic cements and manufactured fasteners that we were content to use before. Three important points of contact of this new ‘balanced’ contact, will be emotional, physical, but more especially, metaphysical.

We, like lonely boulders will find ourselves in families.

The discarded piles of stones will come together and discover order and purpose.

The precious shaped buried stones will be unearthed and cherished.

We, like well-placed stones in a garden wall, will no longer be sporadically dotted around indiscriminately.

There will be a pattern of touching, totally different from the self-centred configurations of ‘pointlessness’ we have for too long pretended to be ‘balanced’ in the past.

Discovering the other half of it.

I'd always puzzled in the past  about having to do a presentation (showing what can be done with stone) if ever the projector lamp burned out, or my laptop battery died. 

I imagined me trying to describe wildly with my hands the span of dry stone bridges I'd built, stretching my arms to show what my stone balances looked like , the shapes of benches and follies I'd built, endeavouring through it all to get across the magic of what could be done using stone alone . No mortar . No glue . No concrete . It would be impossible 

The whole thing would be pretty silly without the visual of modern technology .

Giving that extemporized unprojected non-pixel talk in that Sunday in Ireland, I discovered however that the universe will catch you, and allow experiences and visuals that make even the most well-prepared PowerPoint presentations pale in comparison.

Towards the end of that miracle morning talk, the stone(s) that I'd found on the  beach earlier, became one last solution/demonstration  piece of the puzzle.

I'd found the smaller half stone ( in the upper photo) on a 1/2 mile of shoreline covered in millions of grapefruit sized stones pummelled by the Atlantic Ocean . I thought to myself what are the chances of finding the other half of this stone on this beach? 

I looked around and circled the area where I'd found it searching intently.  It seemed like a silly impossible exercise in improbability. But then i saw it! Lying there surrounded by a myriad of similar sized miss-matched stones was the very mate to the half I had in my hand. 

I walked to the building where I was to give the talk bravely anticipating the whole thing might now somehow magically  'come together' the same way!

Stones and the pattern of light.

That morning a lady came to the front with a different kind of stone. Not one from the island. It was one she wore as a pendant.

A clear amber colour. Was it a quartz or semi previous stone  I'm not sure.

She told us how important the stone was to her , a source of help in ways she wasn't quite able to convey, or me perhaps, I was unable to take in, except to realize it did seem like she had a hidden power in her hands.

She handed it to me and I tried to balance it on the delicate stack of stones I had started on the table.

Happily it balanced for me   

And at the same exact moment a single tiny beam of light from the sun set the crystal ablaze with colour.

The curtains had been drawn to enable projected pics (taken some time ago) to be viewed , and yet were prevented from being shown, because of the computer adaptor problem. This arrangement however had created enough darkness in the room to help focus our attention onto the lit up 'nowness ' of the thing that had just then been balanced . 

Those of us who were there will remember the feeling.

Maybe it didn't make sense .

There still isn't an obvious meaning or purpose to the lighting of the stones, except their being there, the pattern they're supposed to be.

Enchanted Morning

Back in 2017 having been invited to Ireland to speak at the annual Féile-na-gCloch dry stone festival, on the island of Inisoirr, the universe had already arranged it that I would forget to bring my power adaptor for my laptop, thus leaving me with no way to show my photos of what I cleverly had planned to talk about that Sunday morning, September 17.
Little did I know how momentous an occasion it was going to be. After I stopped scrambling to find someone, somewhere, on the island with the electronic solution I so desperately thought I needed, I realized I just 'needed' to start to trusting the universe.
The island may not have had any laptop adaptors lying around anywhere on the beach for me to be able to show photos of stone walls, but it did have plenty of stones. 
And so it was, I came up with a plan, and requested before hand, that people coming to hear my talk, each bring a stone with them, and be prepared to have me talk about each one, and hopefully, together, laying each one on the table I was presenting from, make something with them.
As each person in the audience came to front with their 'special' stone, it started to become apparent that something very magical was taking place. It was confirmed, after hearing so many people afterwards, that the resulting talk was a little short of a miracle.
The first person to come up to the front was my friend Eddy Farrelly, an accomplished dry stone waller and lime mortar expert. He began telling me about why he chose his particular stone.
As he explained that his stone had been 'talking' to him, and that it told him it 'wanted' to be in a wall, I explained to the audience that I had been thinking things weren't going to get so spooky, so early in the talk. 
In the photo above, which I saw later, I see the lamp from the projector, (that was unable to show photos from my dead laptop) is by contrast,  dramatically illuminating his talking stone in a strange iridescent blue, which in retrospect, really was quite fitting. The magic had already began to happen. 
To be continued. . .

Mixed Meta Forms

Metamorphic Metaphor for the Metaphysical

Mica Schist Fish

How’s this for a dry stone concept to be built by a river or a lake for people to lean on and kids to climb over and have their ‘catch of the day’ pictures taken?

Golden Threads

It is not just a plutonic intrusion.
We have a deeper connection to stone 
flowing through our bodies.

We feel it in our veins.

And so do they.

Arch Similarities

One of the arches in the Temple of Imperfections, that we're building, is similar to the two arches in the Pyro-mid we built nearly ten years ago. It uses the same chunky Romero red sandstone for the quoins, and is flanked by the same Sydney Peak mica schist material. Both have the same size openings and thickness of walls. 

The variation being, the temple is a segmented Roman arch, the Pyro-mid is gothic shape, and of course the dry stone wall coursing flanking the arches is different, (one being horizontal and the other being laid at a 45 degrees).

It's very satisfying to compare the two structures. Which arch style do you like?

More Kintsugi

Here’s another way of celebrating brokenness, in what otherwise would be a missed opportunity to see the greater beauty and new aesthetic through the somewhat counter intuitive ’rejoining’ of this basalt column, which arrived on site already broken.

Kintsugi

The Japanese art of 'golden joinery' - kintsugi is a kind of celebration of nature's flaws. It is an important part of the japanese aesthetic of wabisabi.   

It involves a careful rejoining of broken vessels, not to disguise the vessel's brokenness, but to honour an often unrealized transcendent perfection.  

Great appreciation for an object is shown by accepting cracks not as annoying imperfections but as an opportunity to rejoin broken pieces (if necessary) and fill the resulting seams with gold. 

Nature is the example here. It loves filling the flaws and fissures of rocks and stones with golden threads of quartzite and beautiful veins of other colourful contrasting minerals. 

The universe, it seams, embraces imperfections - and so should we. 

Imperfections

This January our intention was to create a pleasing 6 sided dry stone hexagonal structure that incorporated 6 different types of stone and had 6 openings ( three segmented arched doorways and three arched inner niches )

We learned about ourselves and each other as we shared the various tasks of measuring shaping sawing grinding dressing and fitting . All this was done with a realization that even though accuracy was tremendously important it was inevitable that imperfections would have to be assimilated. 

As the thing grew and began to take shape we sensed that what we were building was in no way perfect but rather a kind of temple of imperfections . That is, a place where we accept how certain imperfections if accommodated correctly can be what makes a piece perfect. After all, is it not possible that imperfections can accumulate in such a way as to cancel out each other and so not be imperfect at all, but begin to approach something, quite delightfully, the opposite?

Human Landscapes

The hills on the drive south from San Francisco look like the folds of great blankets covering improbable combinations of giant sleeping bodies 

Happy Neo Year

And so here we all are on the other side. We are in a different time, period. A 'Neo' Year has now begun – 2020, and with it begins a Neo Decade, and as an emerging race of sentient beings, here's hoping we are entering into a whole Neo Era, too.

There have been many errors in past eras, but that doesn't mean we have to make them over again. 

We can learn from the past. Dark ages can become brighter. We may have made a mess of the Mesolithic period, and yes the Neolithic period kind of got old. 

But I believe there is a 'New'-Neolithic Age coming. – a stone age of the near future that may well make the old Palelithic Age pale in comparison.

A time when people turn forward to stone instead of turn their back on it.

A new Stone Age when humans make peace with this rock we all live on.

A future rock epoch where stone becomes ever more present, instead of merely inert inanimate material we extract from the past. 

Instead of dull old ‘post modernism’, welcome to ‘standing stone futurism’ 

Happy Neo Year Everyone!

I have just three words for you, son.

The film The Graduate was released over fifty years ago. It was a good film. There's a poignant moment in it that I'll never forget. After just graduating from college, the advice given to Benjamin from his dad's employer Mr McGuire was just one word - Plastic. 

The scene is distressingly, ironically prophetic.  

It's likely Benjamin never got into plastic, but the rest of the world lost its mind and scrambled to produce and use and throw away as much of the stuff as is earthly possible. 

If only we had stopped back then and listened to the voice of reason. If only the waste and destruction caused by over producing the stuff could have been foreseen and avoided. 
What if there had been something far less harmful to the planet had been promoted?

Is there a chance that Benjamin got into dry stone walling? Perhaps. Maybe others would have caught on to how cool it was, and how non destructive.  Sure, we'd still have to use paper bags, and glass jars and not get into over-packaging stuff and avoid producing and buying a lot of tempting consumer products, but having a generation of people who loved and work with natural stone surely would have been part of a much needed healing process for the earth, instead of the 5 decades of plastic we've subjected ourselves and the rest of the planet too.

Remembering the Stone O Zone

Merry Christmas 

Happy New Year 

and 

Happy Holidays 

from me to all of 

yOu! 

Welcome to the Solstice

There’s a   L  O  N  G    N  I  G  H  T  ... ahead of us.

See you on the other side.

Touching the Emergent Properties

All properties of a complex system that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined. Emergence is an epistemological condition: it means that an observed feature of the system cannot be derived from the properties currently attributed to its constituents. But this is a reason to conclude that either the system has further constituents of which we are not yet aware, or the constituents of which we are aware have further properties that we have not yet discovered.  Thomas Nagel. 

Reading something novel.

It is very unlikely that anything can be truely random.

The concept of random is inconsistent with a closed system of conscious reality.

So randomness is a bit of an inexplicable phenomena.

It's not strange that there is order in the universe . It's the novelty of chance injected into it every moment that is the surprise