The Big Spirit
by Gernot Dick

"How heavy is that stone", is a question many ask. We often respond to objects by how they effect us physically. Very much the same way as we respond to the environment, to the settings around us and to life on the whole globe - physically. If the setting is convenient for our comfort, then it's good. If it's not convenient for us, then it's bad and we try to change it! That is basically what motivates us to reconstruct the world's environment. We call it progress, as it offers conveniences. Even so we know now that this process towards progress kills millions of lives, wipes out three species a day, and finally, will also kill us, we continue to live in such arrogance, in still believing that we can use nature for our convenience. The quasi-religious thinking that "we are number one" started this, and is our biggest sin. We are nature, we are inescapably a part of it, and not one of us is more important than any other creature. We must learn to live life by the universal truth which nature shaped over the last 5 billion years. The balance in our world is not happenstance, not just yesterday's accident. It is the result of millions of years of natural processes - processes we are part of but not the centre of. If we would learn to listen to the truth we would learn to be less arrogant; we would learn that we are not the superior creature - we would accept nature as our mentor.

In spite of our progress, not many of us can shape a perfectly round sphere - but nature can! I have a sense of awe in finding an ancient stone, tossed in round sparkling symmetry along the jagged ridges of earth's slow shaping forces. That is one reason why I look for round stones. They teach me to be more humble, they tell me that I must search, and live by the universal truth of interdependence and interaction, not by striving for unconscious progress which wipes out millions of lives each day, just for the sake of convenience to humanity. The stone, if I listen humbly, teaches me and tells me many stories...

How did this stone, "THE BIG SPIRIT", come about?  Once upon a time - it might have been during the last ice-age or in the ages before, tens of thousands of years ago - the glacier sheered rock from the mountain and swallowed them into the ever hungry, gaping crevices; rough rocks turning and tumbling into smooth stones in the glacier's belly.