Touchstones

I've never been a collector.

This is mostly because I have a deep and abiding hate for crap, borne of a childhood in a house of themed decorating.

Rooms were never just rooms, but excuses to gather and show off repositories of lighthouses, fish, ducks, geese, watermelons, and sunflowers. Nothing was sacred, from lightswitch covers to trashcans. At the age of 34, I have as of yet to actually "decorate" anything in my own home. It makes me itch to pick out a new shower curtain.


Aloha and welcome to hell.

Still, recently Mr. Milkweed tried to sprout some seeds on a shelf in the kitchen window and couldn't, because there wasn't enough space. That shelf is where I keep my rocks.

The thing is, I'm not actually a rock collector. Please-- I worked in a science museum one summer. I know who those people are. They freak out about sedimentary layers and whether rocks are uncut or polished and whether or not what a giftshop tag deemed a "geode" was actually a "vug" or a "nodule." These things matter to these collectors, who as a group are pale and excitable and asthmatic.

So, OK, I am pale, but I'm saved on two fronts-- my stellar sense of fashion, and the fact that I don't actually know anything about these rocks. What are they made of? Search me! How old are they? They're old enough to be rocks. These, I suspect, are the details that interest collectors. If I'm guilty of anything, it's an overly sentimental attachment to the places these rocks came from. (Also, in the case of the rocks from Belize, I'm pretty sure I violated a couple of import laws on transporting foreign soil and minerals. Oops.)

Some of the rocks I picked up during hikes at Hocking Hills in Ohio, where Mr. Milkweed got down on one knee in the middle of a sweaty six-miler and asked me to marry him.

One came from the summit of Humpback Rock on the Blue Ridge.

One is from the garden at Richmond Hill.

One is from my grandparent's farm.

My favorite, though, is from 1987:

I was nine and off for my second summer at camp. One afternoon, the kids in our site got to pick between joining one counselor at waterfront or another for a hike through a ravine by the river. I hated (hate) to swim, because I was afraid (am afraid) of the water. I was in the hiking party before you could say "bug spray."

There were only three of us-- the counselor, myself, and a skinny boy with glasses who was also no Mark Spitz. We didn't talk much, concentrating only on the walk through the woods and the steep climb down the ravine.

There were ferns in there; huge, person-sized ferns. Tree roots grew down from the trees above us, making a kind of canopy. Under our feet, the ground was covered with absolutely enormous sea shells. The counselor knelt and explained that long before there was a James River, this part of Virginia was home to a shallow ocean full of all kinds of ancient marine life. "What's left is all around you," he said.

I clambered around until I found a fossil that was small enough to hold-- a mixture of rock and shells that had been fused together over the centuries. I quietly carried it back to my cabin, and put it in my suitcase. I took it home.

The fossil sat in my room until I graduated from high school.

I took it with me to college.

I took it with me when I moved, at age 20, to Ohio.

It sat in my kitchen near a cactus plant while I went to grad school, got hitched, and had a baby.

I brought it back to Virginia when we moved here in 2009 and it's been sitting in the kitchen ever since, watching me eat late night bowls of ice cream while pregnant with Silas and falling victim to his ketchup-covered hands more than once in recent memory.

This fossil is my most prized possession. When I pick it up, I remember how hard it was to get back up the ravine wall on scrawny nine-year-old legs with one hand clutching it. I remember having to lobby to be allowed to put "that thing" in my bedroom. I remember taking more care to pack it the many times I moved than I ever did a dish or anything else breakable.

As a metaphor, a touchstone is some kind of measure by which you test the validity of a concept. It's a known and accepted value by which you judge something else.

Whether we recognize them or not, we have touchstones in every arena of our lives. How do we know whether some thing or person or idea is worth anything? We look for something to we know to be true, and we move on from there.

In the religious life, stirrings and nudges and feelings of call have to be tested. They have to resound and be recognized in a community united in prayer and working from a growing awareness of the discerner's gifts and what God is asking of that individual.

Such a community must be focused. Centered. "Grounded" is a word that's often used, and it seems especially appropriate to this girl, who has literally so often looked to the ground to offer up some concrete connection to an important time and space.

I can't collect a rock from the trip I'm about to take. Make no mistake, though-- it is a journey, and one that calls for the most important touchstone of all: the Holy Spirit.

So this week, as I eat and sleep and pray my way to my first discernment meeting for ordained ministry on Saturday, I'm moving that fossil out of the kitchen and onto my bedside table, next to the clock radio and the Chapstick and the little icon of Christ Pantocrator.

It's a reminder of both the places I've been and the places where, God willing, I hope to go.