Stacked

I have admired these stone pilings for a long while, but I confess that for the longest time I did not know what they were or what they represented. Last fall, while I was walking along the Boulder Creek Trail in Boulder, Colorado, I noticed that people had stacked these stones in the middle of the creek. I loved the combination of smooth, hard stones licked repeatedly by the rush of cold, rapid water. I tried multiple times during my trip to capture a couple of photos of these rock pilings, but they were placed far in the middle of the creek, the weather was too chilly for me to venture in, and the camera I had at the time didn't have a strong enough zoom to magnify the images as needed. Luckily for me, a rock and cactus garden in the middle of the ASU Tempe campus provided me with this up-and-close photo opportunity today.

So, today, I decided to remedy both my ignorance and my laziness by taking the time to research the meaning behind these stacked stone formations. These are stone cairns, rock formations of ancient Scottish origin, and the sources I found (Wikipedia, for one) stated that these rock pilings might have served a variety of purposes, including memorial and ceremonial functions. Today, their primary purpose seems to be either for decoration, to provide a meditative accent to a garden, or to serve as landmarks on a path, helping to mark a path so that hikers don't stray away from it or to mark a potentially dangerous development in the road ahead.

All paths are fraught with risk. Change, in particular, poses a lot of risk for many, for it leads people to move towards the unfamiliar, to walk in a wholly new direction than where they were headed before, and one never knows where such forks in the road can lead. I think about my past year and realize just how much change I initiated in my life. Just a year ago, I was living back in my hometown of Chicago, considering a move back to Arizona to finally make the West my home, but I kept debating, unsure if I wanted to make the effort of another cross-country move, and feeling disconcerted by the unknown that lay waiting in a direction completely other than the one I had already established. A year later, the change made, and I am making myself at home, the dark shadows of the unfamiliar softening to become the everyday. To be sure, as I try to realize the hopes I had for myself when anticipating my move back, I always have concerns about losing sight of the path, but then I guess this is the value of building a stone cairn: Something visible to mark the path, something to guide you as you continue to move forward.