Stones are the oldest witnesses on the planet. They have seen everything: the appearance and disappearance of countless species of life, the beginnings and ends of epochs. Stones have no doubt. Their path through this world, from the beginning of it until the end of it, is absolutely assured.
But unlike stones, water has been everywhere, has been in everything, has covered everything, has traveled endlessly from the bottom of time. A stone may stand stubbornly in your path as an obstacle that you must climb over or find your way around. But to water a stone is nothing but an opportunity to show its power and resourcefulness, its determination to reach an end and make it a new beginning—and start the whole drama all over again.
If stones are the eternal witnesses to your lives and what happens in them, if it is stones that mark your end and your place of rest, water IS your life—the force that flows through you and expresses itself through prayer. This drama has been going on for so long that you could find no way to fathom it, even if you tried. Mathematics uses powers of ten to fathom the unfathomable, but such devices are useless for measuring the depth of a soul.
Sometimes the rocks stand above the water, but every rock that rises will be covered by water eventually. Wherever you look, everything you see was once at the bottom of an ocean.
If I had to give you a word of guidance to carry you forward through the years to come, a period of great strife and struggle and changes that will come one after another in such quick succession that you may feel you are tumbling through a cataract towards a waterfall, it would be to have the patience of stones and the wisdom of water, whose only master is gravity: the love that holds it forever, making it seek the earth’s embrace.
These are big lessons and long teachings. They are not for you alone. Nor are they for a single lifetime. To master even the smallest bit of them—to have a little patience, a little faith, small measures of resourcefulness and determination—will be more than enough to guide you forward on the path ahead.
To learn everything will require every life you have. But there is no hurry. Hurry is the opposite of faith. Impatience is the opposite of love.