I Stole a Rock and It Didn't Work

Some thoughts on allowing things to be

My uncle shares a name with a mineral I love. His name is an ‘h’ too much, but they are phonetically the same. My elementary school teachers told me these were called homophones—like read and red (you didn’t read ‘read’ as ‘read’ did you?) or sea and see.

The mineral is called mica, and I learned of its name when hiking in North Carolina during my yearly retreat to Montreat.

We were following our guide Aram up and down the hills surrounding the Montreat Conference Center when I noticed the sun hitting the rocks beneath our feet in just the right way. The rocks glistened and shimmered, and I just had to know their names.

Aram told me it was a mineral called mica that caused them to shine.

Every mile we walked, I saw more and more mica. While I see rocks glisten like this on my local hiking trails in north Alabama, there is nothing really like what I was witnessing on these trails in North Carolina.

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A side note: I don’t remember many names of the trails (besides Greybeard, Rattlesnake Mountain and possibly East Ridge). While I usually want a map and track my hikes on one of my apps, when I’m on this retreat, I prefer to just enjoy it without worrying about the mileage or the elevation or the amount of steps I might take.

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On our second day of hiking, an idea came into my head: what if I took one of these rocks to keep for myself? I could keep it on my desk and enjoy the glitter throughout the workday. It would be a good reminder of my yearly pilgrimage to the mountains of North Carolina.

I’ve done this before, of course. As a kid, I would collect different rocks and sticks I thought were cool. I think everyone does this. It’s kind of like visiting the beach and collecting a pail of seashells, right?

But here it felt a little different.

I remembered a sign before one of the trails that warned tourists to not steal the galax. This sign was right before one of my favorite spots on our hike where the trail runs right beside a creek where we can stop and play in the water, put our heads beneath the waterfall, or climb the rocks and trees overlooking the cascading water.

Does this rule apply to mica?

Is it best to leave it where it is? Or would it be okay for me to take it?

I remembered sitting around an unused campfire at the bottom of the Rattlesnake Mountain trail the year before. Aram had told us about Leave No Trace, so I thought I might need to ask about my apple core. Would it be okay to throw into the woods, or should I carry it back to the trashcans at the conference center? He said with the large group we had, it would be better if everyone packed their apple cores back into their packs to be thrown away later.

What if everyone picked up a rock?

Gosh, am I being silly?

I remembered our very first hike the year before. Aram pointed out how all of this land used to—not belong to—be enjoyed by Native Americans long before us. That we came into their home, claimed their land for ourselves (oftentimes in the name of God), and deported them into other parts of the country where we went back on our promises concerning other parts of land.

Am I just stealing more land? Am I playing out, in a very small way, the pattern of white people going into a native land and taking an artifact for their own enjoyment in a square room somewhere under fluorescent lights?

Yeah, I’m being oversensitive, I think to myself.

What could one rock hurt?

After all, I'll be able to enjoy it all year, and it will help me to appreciate these trails I love so much.

So I sneakily (why?) bent down and took a small rock for myself, almost perfect for skipping, and stuck it into my pocket.

Who knows how long this rock had been there in North Carolina? Who knows how many people saw it, enjoyed its shine, and went on their way? Who knows how many more people didn’t see it but passed by with an email on their mind or a meeting rerunning through their head? Or who passed by and missed it because they saw something else: a bird or a fox or a bear?

But this rock traveled the hundreds of miles between Montreat and Albertville, Alabama and found its way to my office. I took it out of my pocket, set it on my desk, and looked down and…nothing.

It looked like a normal rock.

The mica didn’t glisten. When I changed my angle of viewing, there was no shine, at least not like there was in the forest surrounding Montreat.

I stole a rock and it didn’t work.

But why?

My guess is the lighting wasn’t right, but I have another theory. Perhaps it didn’t work because the glisten is more prominent when it exists within a community of other mica-infused rocks.

And so maybe it wasn’t about this individual rock at all.

Perhaps nobody had ever seen this particular rock before.

Perhaps it lived underground for millennia before the trails were made and the dirt, leaves, and rocks were kicked around until I came along and noticed it.

But that doesn’t mean it went unnoticed. Because it was noticed in a community of rocks. The rocks were seen by thousands and thousands of people in their community of rocks. The impact of hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of rocks glistening in the sun in the mountains of North Carolina has undoubtedly fascinated untold numbers of people.

But when one is separated from its home, it loses its shine—or at least the shine it could have.

We have been sold a lie. The lie of individuality. We think that we shine the best when we are separated from others, ahead of the pack. We think we glisten the most when we step out into the sun alone and leave all those other suckers behind.

But the truth is we were made to exist within a community. Paul calls it a body.

Nobody was created to exist alone. We are all part of something better, and while we maintain our individually and are noticed by others, we shine the best when we bring everyone else along with us. Whether it is family or church folk or a group of tired, sweaty pastors, teachers, doctors, ministers, and mystics on a trial in North Carolina, we need each other.

I just signed up to go to Montreat again in the Spring. I think I’ll take that rock home.