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The stone clearing doesn’t look any closer to a resolution, but I have found a rich new seam of chunky stones for my delight. So far I have mainly been clearing the edge of the field, except for that one path across to the main cairn, but over the last couple of days I’ve taken a path that runs diagonally over the main bit of the field. It’s a long, long path and some stone clearers might think that that is of limited use - you could maybe pick up an armful of stones to take to the other side, but what a long journey.
BUT you idiots, there’s a telegraph pole in the middle of the field and a little island of unploughed earth and that will make for an amazing cairn. The rocks around it are plentiful and fist sized. Not even my fist. A proper sized fist. I feel like a prospector in the Klondike having found a bountiful supply of gold. Except these stones are more valuable than gold. Because you can make walls out of them,
The winter is setting in now and the ground is cold. Some stone clearers may be put off by this or wear gloves, but really the whole essence of stone clearing and the philosophical point of it is found in the winter. You push your fingers down into the cold earth and extract a frozen stone, feeling it against your flesh, turning your own bones cold and you are suddenly aware of your own mortality. Life touches death like God reaching out his finger to Adam.
Within a blink of an eye, your living fingers will find themselves buried under the earth and you will be as cold as those stones. You know how cold you will be. It's colder than you think. In that instant you understand that you will die, but you understand that you are alive. You can reach into the grave and pull out the plum of an icy stone, but you will die and join the stones and then decay and the stones will still be there, then they will grind down to dust as the wind and rain pelt down on them over eons. And nothing you do matters.
Except for the wall you are building and the cairn in the centre where future de-evolved humans will dance and praise the unknown god that created this shrine to mortality. For they will be alive, unlike you. But then be dead like you.
And the stones bear witness to their folly.
