This one I placed carefully upon a stump. The lava cooled and was broken into bits that washed away, eventually to the shore, changing on the way to this lovely water-stroked smoothness. This pebble was a dime-sized circle of black basalt shaped by lake waves and probably poured out at one time from a deep volcanic fissure under the sea that covered us. These low docksiders, whiteman’s shoes, seemed to scoop the rocks right in. A good strong branch jutted from the trunk. I dropped the stone to the side of the path and kept walking toward a particular tree I’d picked out sometime before. This, too, was no ordinary rock, but a sharp of graywacke or greenstone, a basaltic lava that was perhaps shoved to the surface of the earth 3.5 billion years ago during the Keewatin. I tossed it over my shoulder and continued down the path. The pebble was a rich, deep, hot, clay red, striated and shaped like a tiny toaster. This piece of stone was laid down as a sediment in the Animikean sea sometime during the middle Precambrian period in Minnesota, and was probably between 2.6 and 1.6 billion years old. The stone was a bit of ferric oxide, earth banded hematite, strayed from the Mesabi Range, where one-third of the world’s iron ore was at once time located. By noon, I was at the Superpumper, deciding which method to use.Īs I walked with a length of rope toward the woods out back of the shop, a pebble flipped into my shoe. And so the morning passed with its coffee and dry cereal. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery.

Not the end of things and not the beginning. Not one aspect of the world could appeal to me or affect me. Once again, I saw into the depths of things only it was worse because things are so much deeper now.

Home of the future living god