Averyville Meditation

Yesterday I walked over to the stretch of beach just past 2nd Beach where my friend Kent Avery balances rocks. Once again he was not present but the stones he balanced a week or so ago were still in place.

I sat on a bench opposite the tallest and most complex of these natural sculptures to listen to the waves and to watch passers by as the stones caught their attention and slowed them down.

The word “glue” is the most widely used in the comments I have overheard over the past couple of years. It seems that folks can’t get their heads around the concept of balance.

“Oh, they are just glued there…”

“He uses glue…”

“It’s impossible; they have to be glued in place…”

Yesterday a group passed by and the women made passing comments about the stones being balanced but one of the men in their group refused to get it. He dropped behind them and tried to slow them up, dissuading them from their false beliefs.

He had his thumb stuck out like some dumb hitchhiker, pointing back in the direction of the rocks and shouted forward to his group, “They’re glued; they’re not balanced. What are you talking about?”

The fact that they were largely ignoring him spurred him on. The whole troupe of them disappeared from my sight around a curve in the seawall, but minutes later he came back like a creature from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, looking in all directions to see if anyone was watching him and then he lowered himself over the edge of the wall onto the rocks below.

He approached one of the smaller structures, balanced on a rock that was fairly accessible and fumbling with both hands made a scrambling climb to the top, where he stood upright and then paused to look over at me…the only person in sight at the moment.

He looked back over his shoulder in the direction his group had gone hoping to prove his point but his body language told that they were no longer watching.

Then he positioned his hand over the topmost tiniest rock (one that he was certain was glued in place) and prepared to try and pick it up to prove his point. He looked at me one more time as he stood in live action pose and then looked back at the stones.

It was as though time was suspended, and all stood still. He didn’t move. I felt that there was a force field shielding the rocks from his intervention.

His hand was only inches away, and then after about a minute where nothing happened, he gestured with his finger (but did not touch) the littlest rock, jumped back down, scaled the seawall and hurried off to join his group.

There was something sacred about that moment in time when this obvious skeptic suspended his judgment which hung in balance like the stones he stood before.

Later on another group biked by where many were pausing to take cell phone snapshots and a woman shouted back to the man following her, “Take a picture, Harry!”

“I don’t have to”, he bravely responded. “I’ll remember it!”

I wish Kent had heard that one.