I love your show on rocks. I'm a geologist also, so I understood the feelings perfectly! All my rocks (and there are MANY-both inside & outside of the house!) mean something to me. But one in particular is important. It's a hand-sized chunk of native copper from the Kewaunaw Peninsula. I got it from a very close friend's father when I was about 10 years old. I've had that rock all my life, and in recent years, it has come to mean something special. It's not shiny, it's very sharp and hard to hold...It reminds me that life is also like that, not always shiny, and if you love someone, don't hold on so tight they can't breath.
Feel the earth, listen to it speak. That's what geologists love to do. Everything in the world needs to be held with love and care, maybe if we all listened more there'd be less time for fighting...

Kathy

While visiting my Mom in Valdosta GA. I caught your wonderful program today. I wanted to comment on the 'favorite rock section.
I too have a favorite rock. As an elementary art teacher I believe that art and earth science, specifically Geology go hand in hand. In my art room I have a rock/science section that the children explore...they bring me rocks and I tell them what they are...( my college science was...guess what...) Anyway I digress.
My husband and I enjoy hiking and camping on Mt. Mitchell in Western NC. Naturally, I love to look at every rock. I found a small piece of kyanite, the mineralogy and formation to me is amazing. On one side is kyanite and mica on the other. Here is 'rock' so strong that tiles on the space shuttle contained it and the other with plates so weak my pocket knife could flake it off.
How like life is this combining weak and strong...colors bright and dark...bound together in a dance of the earth's constant state of change....We are truly children of the stars.
Thank you again. I listened, eyes close thanking the universe for this chance hearing...knowing that there are others out there who see wonder in every stone.

Shalom,
Cissy

(see below for script & mp3 file)
And maybe I should share my rock with some rock specialist from Wisconsin?

>Leona
>Bourbon, Mo.
>11 degrees on our ll00 ft. ridge this morning,
>6 degrees in St. Louis, where the old river rolls by.
>If I got really bored, I would start wondering about Chief Pontiac, who
>lived where I came from, West Bloomfield, Michigan, and how, somebody
>of his own race clobbered him here in St. Louis and maybe he was
>interred under Market Street, where he would not be now. Where would
>he be? In those clouds above us today?

I listened with interest to your ‘rock’ stories last Sunday on PBS station WJXT in Jacksonville, FL. At the end of the program you solicited rock stories.
Well I have a rock story and a question. Can a little girl infuse a rock with magic?
It was 1969 and the nation was at war in Viet Nam. I had joined the Navy a year earlier and was leaving for my first duty station, USS Vermilion
LKA107 berthed in Norfolk, Virginia. On my last day at home I had packed and loaded the car, changed into my uniform, said my good-byes and was walking to the car when my little sister Valli came running out of the house calling to me. She was about 7 years old at the time. Our dad had been a career Naval Officer and fighter pilot and together with glimpses of the evening news she had some sense of the dangers involved in military life.
She ran to me clutching something in her hand and had the most serious look on her little face I think I had ever seen. She held out her hand and opened it as she looked into my eyes. She told me that she was giving me a magic rock and that if I carried it with me it would keep me safe. I knew that she was serious so I reached to take the ‘rock’ from her hand and thanked her with a hug. It was, in fact, what looked to be a little chunk of green concrete but as far as I was concerned it had been transformed into a magic rock by the will of a child.
I carried the magic rock with me for my entire enlistment. Several times I was in situations where I certainly should had been killed but emerged unscathed. One midnight I was nearly washed over the side in a bad storm while walking across the deck to stand a watch in after-steering. A giant wave crashed over the ship knocking me down and sending me hurdling towards the gunwale with only 3 cables stretched across as a barrier. I was washed between the cables in the pitch black and howling wind certain I was going overboard.
As I flailed about with both arms I managed to snag a cable with a few fingers of one hand and held on for dear life. I was dangling from the cable, over the side of the rolling ship but was somehow able to pull myself to safety. Had I missed the cable I wouldn’t have even been missed for half an hour. Another time I picked up a hang-fire (a live round spit onto the deck of my gun mount from a rapid-firing twin 40mm anti-aircraft gun), threw it overboard as we had been trained to do and watched it explode after just breaking the surface of the water.
A few years later I was out of the Navy and back in Atlanta. Bo Martin, a friend of mine had joined the Army and was shipping out for Viet Nam. On his last day at home I remembered the magic rock. I found it, broke it in two and drove over to Bo’s house hoping I wasn’t too late. He was getting ready to leave when I got there and I gave him half of the magic rock (hoping that he would still get a full measure of the magic) and told him that if he carried it with him to Viet Nam it would keep him safe. He did; it did and he returned home from combat a few years later safe and sound. I saw him recently for the first time in years. I asked him if he remembered the magic rock. He still has it.
No one will ever convince me that a seven year old girl cannot take a little love and turn a piece of green concrete into a magic rock.

Dale Pline

It's out of the closet. It's standing in the middle of the room with its pants down. It's universal. What a relief. Thank you.

I've been writing a book for the last year called Boredom. I have stacks of cards ready at hand all over the house and in my purse so I can catch the exquisite sensation in the very moment of... it;

an afternoon stretches ahead and I haven't a single thing to do, nausea, very faint rises in my throat I am a dry log. Throw me in the fire.
My mouth is stopped. Fear. That I won't be able to speak again.
The phone hasn't rung today. No blink of a missed call from someone. No one's out there.
The sense that comes and goes of the sacred permeating everything. For which we seek.
My body parts air, like water. I'm walking to that door to pick up Ella (the cat). A subtle division. I watch myself walk through the kitchen to pick up Ella. Last night I walked through the kitchen to pick up Ella at exactly 10:43. At exactly 10:43 tonight I'm walking though the kitchen to pick up Ella like I've done last night and the night before.
Is ennui the subtle division. I'm watching myself watching myself.
I pedal the bike to Starbucks to read. Starbucks is full of people, scrunched into soft chairs, reading. They're there because at home they are surrounded with space, vast in all directions. Suffocating.
"Things will be great when you're down town."

Everything we do, after we have put the food on the table, and after we have recuperated from this, is nothing but a bone thrown to the dog of boredom. War, reading, pets, the Super Bowl, NPR news, politics, working out at the Y. Book Clubs, all cultural structures, all religion are inventions to amuse our passionate minds, our craving for meaning.
To assuage the gnawing dogs of boredom, freedom, emptiness.

I have no judgment on all of this unlike some of your interviewees.

The art of living includes dancing with boredom and finding what you love.

Anyway, I couldn't help writing you because I enjoyed your program so much. Thank you.

Priscilla

Dear Mr. Fleming,

Did you ever notice that all the slackers you discussed are guys (I wouldn't bother to call them men)? I could go on, but what's the point?

Women have too much sense and like to have clean clothes, clean apartments, and decent food on the table.

Thanks for listening. Jane

I am writing to suggest that perhaps you could keep in mind that someone may tune in and not even be sure of what they are listening to. I would suggest that you slow down when giving authors' names, titles, and website. I tried to find you at TTP.org- and then at TTb.org which I thought I heard, but that gave me a bible website.

Perhaps, a considerate warning, such as "if you want to write this down...." or if website domain is case-sensitive, clue us in. Also T and B can sound the same... etc.

Here I go again,
For me, the most important idea in this segment was Ann Stringchamps (sp?) observation about men being "bored" and women being "depressed," i.e. the former sees the problem on the outside, the latter as an inward situation.
This triggers one of my favorite theories, which is that our culture, dominated outwardly at least by the masculine point of view, (I think of the US, but maybe it's more western culture in general -- I didn't hear comments from eastern cultures about boredom) is greatly lacking in a sense of the importance of the inner world, the psyche if you will, or maybe the soul. To put it bluntly, it seems that in many cases, individuals do not have a sense of their own particular value, just as they are, and therefore are always looking (hell-bent your last speaker might say) to find stimulation and meaning outside of themselves. (There is a point of view that would say that all we perceive is inside us, since all we can really know is what we are able to aware of. We never know what, if anything, is "out there.")
In a lecture about metaphysics it was said that if we really knew how to pay attention, a grain of sand would be the most amazing thing in the world. I think of the small child who looks at the tiniest creature, or rock(!) for that matter, with rapt attention and delight. That "being present" is certainly part of the Buddhist way of life.
Why must we see boredom as a problem rather than a symptom, a red flag to get one's attention that something is out of order, so to speak, one is somehow "off the track?" That assumes that there is a track of course, and not everyone would accept that. There are many things we might think we want to ignore in this world -- like the suffering of a loved one and our own anger that we are helpless to do anything about it -- or perhaps just the general sense that life isn't going the way we thought it should.
The process of familiarization and automatization is certainly real and helpful in that we don't have to rethink every move we make, but like each advantage (fire for example) it has its dark side. That would seem to be the nature of the paradoxical place in which we find ourselves. William James pointed out that the brain is a filter at the turn of the last century, and spoke of how the newborn struggles to make sense out of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" into which he/she is born. Influenced by the example of those around us, we find the "consensus reality," which has survival value, but is far from the whole picture, whatever that is. Perhaps what we call boredom
is "reality" prodding us to notice that we're missing something!
Thanks for your stimulating program.

Ellise
Mt. Shasta, CA

I am troubled by the complete intellectual perspective taken on this subject. Anyone who lives ONLY in their head, and through using today's mechanical contraptions is sure to be bored!! I missed part of the day's discussion but did catch the last 45 minutes, especially La Pena. Of course those people will be bored who have moved so far from interacting with nature that they have become robotic. But the way out certainly is not through war nor does it have to be. I will give you an example from my
life:

I lived for 20 years in the Twin Cities, immersed in my demanding job and lifestyle. At age 62 I chose to leave all that and move to Bayfield, Wisconsin, where I built a house on land I had purchased in the 80's. It had been my dream to do this since the purchase. After the move, I experienced all the phases of "retirement", "semiretirement" and "older age". As I was replenished by life here I felt no sense of boredom. My goal in moving was to reconnect both with nature and with the day-to-day living that humans need to be continually stimulated. The ways in which my brain had been put on "autopilot" through the life I had been living slowly dissipated, as I reconnected with living in the moment. Carp Diem! is of course the answer - but be sure to do it in the woods, without our cell phone!

Linda
Bayfield, WI

I've always loved rocks.

My mom's story has me sitting, age 4 in the back yard. I'm trying to break open a rock to see what's inside. In fact I already know, I can see it; a world of color, crystal and light, like a fairy mound.

(gravel, pebbles, stones )

I was born on Long Island, NY, itself a huge pile of rock, sand and clay dropped by the exhausted final push of a glacial ice sheet 20 thousand years ago, give or take a millennium.
New York's geology is incredibly diverse and visible. Manhattan's skyline reflects the depth of its underlying bedrock: skyscrapers on the rock, shorter buildings where the terra's not as firm. Road cuts demonstrate fragments of continents and eras cheek by jowl, layers folded and swirled like formal drapery, frozen time.
The boulders in my back yard were sequined with mica and garnets.

(granite, gneiss, schist )

In high school I wanted to be a geologist, but arithmetic was formidable and higher math as manageable as climbing Everest in flip flops. But the lure of the rocks never went away. I collected books about geology, took pictures of rocks, and picked up stones everywhere I traveled. Bits of the planet have gone with me all over the country, boxes full of rocks driving movers crazy.

(igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic )

The language of geology began to sound like poetry to me, and eventually, geology became a part of my spiritual beliefs, a way to understand deep time and great force. A rough knowledge of the workings of the planet became the foundation for my system of personal philosophy.

(West Falls sandstone, Ordovician dolomite )
The vast stretches of geologic time have become a comfort, helping me understand that catastrophe and rebuilding are as essential to the life of the planet as they are to an individual. If, as in the Chinese story of Pan Ku , we are just parasites on the skin of the world, so long as the earth remains life has the opportunity to try again and again.

(orogeny, erosion, unconformity )

Now I live in Wisconsin on a pile of rock, sand and clay dropped by the exhausted final push of a glacial ice sheet 18 thousand years ago. It seems a long way from New York, but oddly enough the same ice sheet formed Long Island where I was born.
Full circle? Well, I figure eventually another glacier will be back to continue the landscaping job.

(Archean, Paleozoic, Cenozoic )

Caryl W. Owen
Technical Director
To The Best Of Our Knowledge