Like a Rock

Weathering well with Ruth Allen

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Photo by Leio Mclaren on Unsplash

Geological processes are, in many ways and with a bit of imagination, human processes. We are – in many ways – kin. We too are subject to weathering and erosion, we know what it’s like to face pressure, we know that personal transformation can happen when the heat is applied.

Ruth Allen, Weathering

I’ve always been a sucker for a good metaphor. Metaphors help us to express complex concepts in ways we can more easily understand; they bring to life dull or abstract ideas and help us relate to the unrelatable; they accentuate a distinct aspect of something that we may otherwise have missed, bringing it to our attention in a memorable way. Metaphors humanize the nonhuman, spotlight the obscure, bring order to disorder, and help us think about our very complex world in ways we can more easily understand.

That’s just one reason I love Ruth Allen’s new book Weathering—it’s one long, beautiful, and highly resonant extended metaphor on the human condition. Perhaps you’ve never thought about all the ways the human experience is like that of rocks, soil, and other geologic elements. Allen will open your eyes with metaphors like this one:

Hills and mountains are places of stature and uplift and rocks towering into the atmosphere. Don’t they just rise and rise as continents come together, or slide beneath one another? While this is true, mountains can only be maintained because they are also places of vast removal. Upland areas that are still uplifting, such as the Peak District, are doing so precisely because of the erosion that is constantly unburdening the land of their material. In short, stuff must be lost for everything to keep rising. This tells me two fundamental truths: one, that in order to evolve and grow, we must be prepared to face the erosive aspects of life. Two, it’s the weathering that creates the finest landscape of our lives, shaping us and defining us over time. (loc. 306)

As a former geologist turned psychotherapist, Allen unsurprisingly pursues this metaphor of growth, removal, and tectonic shift throughout the book, exploring how getting in touch with the sediment under our feet can literally ground us. In her outdoor sessions with clients, she seamlessly blends nature and nurture in a type of therapy called ecosomatics. Hiking through wilderness together and exploring physical landscapes, Allen and her clients simultaneously excavate and shape inner landscapes to bring about psychosomatic healing:

Ecosomatics is an emergent nature-based discipline at the intersection between ecology, the environment, and the lived experience of the body. It refers to both the relational web of all life, and our experience as a body within that, as felt from the inside. It is a body-centred practice of listening, sensing and observing ourselves, but also the world more broadly on varying scales of locality, with a view to supporting kinship, belonging and even radical entanglement. At the core is a question of emotional, physical, spiritual impact: How am I affected, and what is my effect? (loc. 1472)

At some level we all know that rocks are literally the foundation of our lives, but we rarely pause to think about them. Allen finds in our willful ignorance of geologic structures the roots of disconnection from the natural world. By bringing her clients into direct contact with rocks—touching them, feeling ourselves standing firm on them, imaging the world from their point of view—she helps people develop a solid inner core and sense of self. I am mesmerized by her descriptions of the solidity of this work:

For people who don’t know their own substance – who might be disconnected from their bodies, untethered by trauma, or for other reasons may feel lacking in a sense of their own strong, capable and resilient potential, rock offers a way into a new set of experiences. In a wounding and judgemental world, spending time with rock keeps something inside me solid when it would be easy to collapse.

Rocks have broad shoulders. They carry a lot of weight. They uphold cities, entire worlds. They are in the truest sense of the word, foundational. What we might then call a geosomatics of substance teaches us how to load-bear, and thus gives solace and reassurance for the most difficult times. After all, life is not light work; it demands heft. Exploring how to bear weight, to be resourced by gravity, to know your own substance, is perhaps one of the most fundamental requirements for a human being, or indeed any creature in the modern world. (loc. 1498)

At the same time that rocks can help us stand firm and bear our burdens, we have a responsibility toward them as elements of the natural world. Because rocks are inert and lack agency, many people tend to see them as open for exploitation to serve human needs. Allen insists this is a mistake. While rocks are not animate, they still deserve our care and respect.

Recalling the attitude of reverence for all things that we discussed in my post on Kinning, Allen reminds us that the abiotic parts of our world are foundational to our ecosystems. Human-made geologic devastation—for example through strip mining, erosion due to habitat destruction, or coastal erosion from rising seas—is ruinous for everything on the planet. To counteract our tendency to overlook rock and soil, we must learn to “see things” from a geological perspective, to feel more kinship with the rocky elements and take better care of them:

Our ability to situate ourselves with the abiotic foundations of the earth is likely to be essential in our ability to recognise that in many ways our impact is akin to a geological force. No other animal has had the same ability to disrupt the old and ancient cycles in the ways that humans do. We have gone higher, deeper, wider than any other being – holding a control that we haven’t yet worked out what to do with; that is, in net-service rather than net-degradation. Humans are not immoral and evil. We are simply negligent in ways that are wildly consequential. We have not paid attention properly to the world and its needs. We have prioritised our own, rather than entered fully into the negotiation of needs that underlies true relationships between two entities. (loc. 434)

This relationship fits very well with a Stoic approach to caring for the natural world. The ancient Stoics believed that all physical entities are made of the same stuff—substance and an animating force they called pneuma, or breath—and that differences in animacy and intelligence result from different levels of tension within each entity. So a rock, a bird, and a human consist of fundamentally the same material, but differences in tension give rise to different features and abilities.

In the 21^st century we might say something similar: everything is made of the same types of abiotic elements, but differences in organization and complexity mean that some things are alive while others are not. And among those things that are alive, some are very simple (flatworms), some are very complex (elephants), and some are even able to shape the whole planet itself (humans). Although humans may seem different in kind from other creatures, our complexity is simply a difference of degree. We are all made of stardust.

Living Like a Rock

While Weathering is chock full (or perhaps I should say chalk full) of wise observations on the connections between sediment and human, the key takeaway for me is the strength we can gain from metaphorically living like a rock. Now, obviously this requires a bit of imagination, and the metaphor is not exact. Rocks are inanimate and they have no control over what’s done to them, whereas humans have agency and are active participants in our own environments. Stones have no emotions or desires and cannot experience temptation or happiness. For these reasons Seneca denies that a wise person would be the same as a rock:

There are other things that strike the wise person even if they do not overthrow him, such as physical pain, loss of limb, loss of friends and children, and during wartime the calamity of his fatherland in flames. I do not deny that the wise person feels these, for we do not endow him with the hardness of stone or iron. To endure without feeling what you endure is not virtue at all.

On Constancy, 10.4

On the other hand, Epictetus tells his students,

Go up to a stone and subject it to abuse; what effect will you produce? Well then, if you listen like a stone, what will anyone who abuses you be able to achieve?

Discourses, 1.25, 28-29

And Marcus Aurelius, in a strikingly beautiful image, says,

Be like the headland, with wave after wave breaking against it, which yet stands firm and sees the boiling waters round it fall to rest. ‘Unfortunate am I that this has befallen me.’ No, quite the contrary: ‘Fortunate am I, that when such a thing has befallen me, I remain undisturbed, neither crushed by the present nor afraid of what is to come.’ For such a thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have remained undisturbed in the face of such a blow.

Meditations, 4.49

So I think we are justified in pursuing the rock metaphor as far as we can, while also acknowledging the limits of the metaphor—we aren’t trying to develop hearts of stone. But embodying some of the desirable qualities of the mineral elements (strength, endurance, consistency, broad shoulders) can help us to withstand the challenges of our more malleable human existence.

Here is how Ruth Allen reflects on the beauty of living like a rock:

Once upon a time I started to imagine how it would be to live like rock rather than simply walk on it, run on it, climb it, study it. To become less of an observer and more of a participant in the ways of rock. In doing so I realized that the rock’s way is to know its place. When a rock falls, it rarely falls far. Even when tilted, folded, eroded, extruded and exploded rock has a degree of locality, which is different to, say, water. I realized that in a fundamental way, rocks can teach us how to be in place, in situ, and still evolve. What if I too could develop a place-based groundedness, where rocks would teach me to sit still occasionally and not always be in a rush to find something new to see and do, but to notice, enjoy, be awakened by the world. (loc. 3373)

From this description and others throughout the book, I think there are several good ways we can embody the strength and timelessness of geology:

• Know your place, in the sense of understanding and truly belonging to the environment you find yourself in. It’s a valuable skill to feel truly anchored to your specific location but also part of the world at large.

• Evolve right where you are. So many of us feel that we have to go somewhere else in order to develop, but Allen points out that we can also evolve right where we are. Can we stay in place and stop running? Can we weather gracefully right where we are?

• “Notice, enjoy, and be awakened by the world.” As quiet observers of the world, rocks see everything that happens around them. Can we, rocklike, learn to carefully observe and appreciate what’s around us?

• Keep your feet on the ground. There’s nothing wrong with soaring to lofty heights—just ask the mountain peak—but you can only do so when you’re stably anchored on the earth.

• Stay solid. Rocks have always been a go-to metaphor for strength and solidity, but it doesn’t hurt to remember that they are literally the foundation of the world. We don’t build cities on shifting sands—we burrow down to bedrock in order to find stability. Likewise, though it’s tempting to rush around chasing the latest trends (be they social, cultural, or political), nothing ever survives for long without a solid foundation.

As we evolve in place, being uplifted and eroded in our turn, our philosophical principles and a stable sense of self—who we are in our innermost core—will help us stand strong as we weather the storms of life. Through hot sunny days and cold wintry nights, through the forces of wind and water flowing over and aging us, we can become polished and beautiful like unique pieces of art. And as humans we have the added gift of participating in and appreciating the process. As Ruth Allen puts it very wisely (loc. 3580):

Anyone can and will weather, but weathering well necessitates a radical acceptance of all that will be revealed along the way and a commitment to stay true to your new shape.

You will love Weathering if you enjoy gorgeous nature writing, internal exploration, and a scientific understanding of the world. There is quite a lot of therapeutic language, which I know some people find off-putting. If you don’t like the language of therapy, this book is not for you. However, for those who want to dive deeper into ecosomatics and psychological healing in a unique and profound way, I highly recommend this beautiful book by Ruth Allen.