“Stone breathes within nature’s time cycle. It doesn’t resist entropy but is within it. It begins before you and continues through you and goes on. Working with stone is not resisting time but touching it.’’-–Isamu Noguchi
A particularly rich zone of contact between lived human time and geological time is created while balancing or stacking stones. A stone’s specific morphological features are traces of multiple events across diverse timescales, from tectonic processes of subduction and uplift to tidal tumbling and wind wearing. Every little feature one searches out, the features that make a balance possible, result from an untraceable sequence of minute events. George Quahsa’s phrase “stones stutter to a balance” thus echoes across several timescales. Stacking stones successfully is less about control over material than allowing materials and bodies (including one’s own) to merge with one another and assume a new form. Balancing stones requires an attentive listening through touch, bringing the histories of stones to intersect and interact with the human body’s clocks, the metabolic processes of muscles, the diastolic and systolic pumping phases of the beating heart, and the inhalation and exhalation of breathing. Breathing with stones, touching their sense, entails aligning our mind and senses with breathing, and the in/out, move in/pull away rhythm of balancing stones merges with breathing as well.
