Doe Bay, Orcas Island, June 2010, looking south by southwest.  Early morning, low tide.

Graywacke (pronounced ‘gray-wacky’): An aggregate type of very hard sandstone that originates in environments where erosion, transportation and depositing happen so quickly that the minerals and rocks do not have time to break down into finer constituents. The origin of greywacke is problematic prior to the understanding of turbidity currents since, according to the normal laws of sedimentation, gravel, sand and mud should not be laid down together.

But, here I am, defying the laws, again.

Just this past Tuesday on a hike on Orcas Island, I came across an educational sign that talked about being on the lookout for ‘graywacke’ stones. I was taken with the word and with its meaning. In those amazing islands, shifting tectonic plates at their core, developed by the tremendous pressures of glacial hazing, I thought about our lives.

I sometimes feel like the sort of stone that has come about quickly with little time to think or process. I often don’t find the time to ‘break things down into their finer constituents’, but find myself geologically flowing, colliding with the neighboring tectonic plate. And then there’s the ice.

As the earth grinds me into the next land mass, and the ice wears away only the roughest edges, then melts and strips me, I feel bare, exposed, naked to the wind and the rain. Some miracle occurs after centuries, even eons of nakedness, a seed floating from some distant unfathomable shore lodges in one of my cracks.

You, my lovely friends and readers, are those seeds. You are growing, slowly in the miniscule amounts of fertile soil that have accumulated in the fissures of my being. You are magnificent firs, cedars, madronas, ferns. You are stinging nettles and poison oak. You are slugs and rain and sun. Your roots are separating me into my constituent parts. Your mosses and lichens are holding me together while you do so. 

I am graywacke in love with you.

Top of Mt. Constitution, Orcas Island, June 2010

Mt. Constitution, Orcas Island, June 2010, looking east towards Bellingham