Family Nature Journal
Option 7: Finding your Formation

"Three billion years was too long a time to contemplate with wisdom and perspective. All I could do was be aware of the beauty around me. I could look at the rose quartz in its vein and delight in its color and the perfection of its crystals. I could explore the surrounding hills and find it in all its infinite variations as I did not long ago at the site of an abandoned mine shaft of the Vermillion gold rush of almost a century ago."
 – Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point, "Rose Quartz"







Growing up for many years as a boy in the small, near alpine lake city of Coeur 'd Alene Idaho, there are a few natural images that I carry with me as though they were captured photographs and available in a back pocket: one is the mountainous pine needle floors of the forest, and the warm and earthy smells that rise up from the soft soil surrounding the trees, how they felt safe, secluded, and welcoming. Another is the grand lake itself, a true emerald wonder with seemingly infinite styles of rock promontories that jutted out at the shoreline and collected bobbing driftwood.  But it was the rocks themselves that lined the hiking trails of Canfield Mountain, an often attended city hiking trail system, that offered the child's imagination a sort naturally occurring playground – rocks formations that erupted out of the earth like wide flat sea ships that were safe and easy to climb.  To try to climb these ancient playgrounds took virtually all of the combined skill and imagination that a young person could muster.  Once you make it a part of the way up a particular rock climb, something begins to take over, an innate desire to 'summit' for the sake of not only accomplishing a feat that a shy young person might not ever attempt otherwise in other facets of life, but to gain a new view on things, maybe twenty feet higher up, at the top of the ship where the air is a little different, and the landscape along the veins of the rock, mysterious and magical. The mind, without thinking about it much, drifts off to not only years past, as it wonders what native or pioneer had seen and climbed this very rock, but forward, wondering if other would get such a chance in the future. In a nutshell, it is the very essential kind of experience that forms the narrative of natural images of mind. And unlike the other, electronic, side of experience, which tends to pass by as continual stream of non-creative acts, finding one's 'formation' is a binding act with the living world, a state and stage of the process of defining character and coming to understand a connection with the landscape.

We were reminded of this one more time on a few hour visit to Devil's Lake, Wisconsin. Descending here on an early October day in mid afternoon sunshine is a little bit like being transported back to childhood, or to a magical island, where the rocky quartzite shores rise up out of the robin's egg blue water, itself a deep curve that looks like the cauldron of a long dormant volcano. Along the west shore path, we passed a hundred people offering up to their own children the prospects of landscape memories. The tumble rock trails is exactly what it sounds like – a view up along enormous rockfalls of quartzite boulders, many of which are perfect little sea ships to climb, and warm up on if they

happen to face the sun.  Many of the boulders – much in the same way that Olson's memories of quart were a rose color – showed a faded green pattern and glow faintly against a crisp October sun. The trail moves past the entire shoreline then wraps up along the backside of the bluff so get another view of these rocks but from above this time.  Formations beyond anything that the imagination could create from scratch, often stand seemingly teetering out beyond which the tops of old pines and beyond that the blue of Devil's Lake.  By the time you reach back to the bottom at the shoreline beach at the visitor's center, something has just happened – you have just experienced millions of years of geologic history and placed your own foot trodden stamp on monuments of time itself.  As Olson says, there is too much here to ponder with pure wisdom or perspective. Instead it is a kind of absorption of something sustaining, a knowing of one's surroundings, and that positive emotion that comes along with it is only a stone's throw away at any moment.

Option 6: Find your favorite formation and promise to continue to return as often as possible.  Much of the drift less area of Wisconsin offers, at the least, limestone bluffs or the dropped rocks from ancient glaciation.  Everyone should have a place to go to be by rocks.  A temptation no doubt will come to turn these rock ventures into events, activities, experiments, yes, even writing assignments. Rocks, however, are literally 'awe' some and need nothing more than to be experienced.  We used to live at bottom of bluff and could easily take a trail up into ridges where the limestone was exposed.  One day we began to walk off trail and found, at the very edge of the ridge, one line limestone rock which had, over the eons, lost much of its base to wind erosion but the bulbous top was wide and easy to climb up and safe and flat at the top.  There was no need for anything else in this moment. A kind of kindred wisdom seeps up and takes hold, a quiet zone where history sits without a lesson or a plan.