i've always considered myself closer to the physical earth than the living spheres it supports, and though i increasingly find belonging amongst the latter, the former is ever present in my mind and is a large part of what pursuits i dream to give my all to the moment i am able.
going through my academic career and solidifying my relationship with geology has really brought me to realize that i could very easily compare rock spirits to plant spirits without doubt. from what i’ve gleaned with my time around rock bodies and individual pieces, it’s almost a direct parallel that can be drawn between a single rock fragment to, say, a replanted branch from a tree. there’s a lot of focus on the “source” for both plants and rocks, i think, not necessarily in a way we could comprehend as relatively single beings (with variation of course, given experiences like plurality), but in a way that’s at least understandable for the sake of getting to know separate spirits and their temperaments. a sample of the Marchand Sandstone is going to inevitably have the energetic signature and baseline persona of the Marchand as an entire rock body, whether or not that specific sample has developed a subpersonality of its own. plants and rocks are strangely omnipresent in that way. now i begin wonder if to the rock bodies themselves, something like spread fragments would be comparable to, say, astral work for us, sending out the spirit in fragments similar, or as a whole by their (or our, for the sake of example) choosing. i find myself thinking about plant and fungal spirits a lot in this way as well, of course, in conjecture with my experience with geologic spirits.
in short, i suppose i just really hope all the various rock types in our department’s rock garden and basement gallery, every crystal point or particularly interesting grab on my windowsill, every bagged research sample in the box on my floor from which i am gaining so much knowledge of the past and the creature it preserved for us to see, know and delight in our adoration and tending of them, wherever their original source body may be to sense it. i hope the love i give to the arm is the love that translates to the heart. i hope the earth below knows it is loved, loved by this lone thing tucked in a room far away, hands grasping gently to a piece of their soul and whispering to it their secrets.
