Knowing About Rocks
As a person wrestling with my high empathy I get scared teaching is too emotionally charged of a calling. A chat about rocks eased those fears.
Adulthood is a constant paradox. I’ve perhaps never felt so free in my short time as an adult than when I was the most broke and emotionally drained I had ever been. As a fresh college dropout I was churning through jobs I didn’t care about that didn’t care about me, holding each as long as my temper would allow. Every spare second was spent outside, hiking and picking up rocks.
I always lagged behind my husband and our dog, staring at the ground. I would cry when there was a rock on the trail you could tell was part of a much larger boulder, moved by the magnitude of something like that going untouched in our world of chaos. Things are always changing, but here’s this boulder, smoothed by footsteps and time but buried safe into the earth.
A deep appreciation for rocks is part of why my husband and I connected so instantly. We both have a strong sense of childlike wonder that we’ve been keeping alive in one another since we met at 19. One of the first times we hung out he brought out his rock collection, and I probably cried then too.
It reminded me so much of the tackle box of admittedly much less cool rocks I had collected as a very young child living with my grandparents. There was a summer that some big construction project happened and a huge hole was dug into the earth. My grandpa and I would go pick pieces of granite and fossils out of the site when the day’s work was through. We would look at the shells and corals and talk about all the things that lived where we lived before we lived there.
Years later as a late teen when they moved out of the house they’d lived in my whole childhood-the house I’d lived in briefly-I found those same rocks just how I’d left them. The wave of emotions that crashed over me when I discovered them became a metric for how it should feel to be loved and seen that I carried into adulthood.
So as I listened to my then boyfriend excitedly tell me all about his favorite rocks and where he’d gotten them, sheepishly pausing every now and then as if this were the type of activity we probably should’ve abandoned a few years ago, I encouraged him and listened.
Now, years later and after many hardships, we had returned to the rocks when we needed to feel and nothing else was working. Being outside helps in general. But I specifically remember one moment jaunting down a steep hill and crouching to inspect a particularly shiny piece of pink granite. I yelled something down the trail to my husband about just wanting to do something with my life where anyone else will care this much about rocks.
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Last week my coworker and I started our fifth session of an after-school art program. The entire experience has been beautiful, and as close to living within my “calling” as I have ever personally felt. As my health becomes a bigger and bigger focus of my life though, this concept of a calling and whether this was mine has been coming up for me again.
I love our kids perhaps to my own detriment. Sometimes I have similar fears about what I’m doing now as I do when people tell me I’d make a great therapist. Being good at something doesn’t make it good for you. Was this taking more from me than it was giving back, than I could replenish myself? Especially at a time where I was intentionally going through a process of emptying and reshuffling?
Many of our kids are returners now; they love the program, and have been in it since nearly the beginning. We started at a new school this year and it has been exciting to get the cozy experience of faces you know as well as getting to meet new students. Getting to earn the students trust over time is a very special part of the job to me.
Our new class has already started off on a great foot. The program is a collaboration between the local school district and the Community Center I work for, and a few of the students have actually been there for summer camp. So, vibes were hype our first day of class already and the rest of the students seem eager to get to know us now.
The second day of class there was some vaguely stressful stuff happening behind the scenes I was working through in my head when a student popped out from beside me and asked “What’s your favorite rock?”
I froze in my spot. My first thought was just that my answer will never matter as much as it does right now. At first I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t think of a single rock and stood there silently, then began to frantically rolodex through every rock I knew to decide which was my favorite.
My hesitation read as confusion, or perhaps dismissal. A few moments later she dejectedly told me “I bet you don’t even know any rocks,” right as I finally answered moss agate. She gasped and looked up at me in near shock, eyes sparkling.
“Most people would say amethyst or something. . .” she told me.
“But a crystal is so different than a rock, and rocks are special too!” I responded, interrupting a child because I can’t help myself.
“Exactly!” She responded. Then she looked down at the ground, whispered “Botswana Agate” and ran back to her seat, and the moment was over.
Moss Agate || watercolor, gel pen
That night when we were talking about our day, this same story was the highlight of mine - a day where I’d been out and about from 8am to 8pm. That night as I relayed the whole story to my husband his face lit up when I got to the punchline.
“My favorite rock is a Botswana Agate too!” he burst out, already running to retrieve his box of rocks.
Sure enough he pulls out a polished Botswana Agate about the size of a large grape. He began launching into his own tale about his estranged uncle bringing him the rock and telling him all about it’s magical properties. At the time the agate rings on the face of the rock were the exact same size as his thumb in a way that made him feel the stone was meant to be his. Now his thumbprint was probably double the size.
“You can bring it to class to show her, since it’s her favorite, but you have to bring it back because it’s also my favorite,” he told me, looking between me and the rock with such a sincerity I could see the child that first received the stone behind his eyes.
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I’m a lot of things to a lot of people, but in my heart I’m a big kid with my head in the clouds and hands in the dirt. That’s gotten me exploited a lot in my life, but it’s who I am, and I’m more comfortable with adjusting how I live than trying to be who I’m not.
My students see me for who I am, and we see each other in ways that benefit us both. My role in the classroom is actually more as an assistant than the one actually teaching the material. I sort of do exist in a near-therapist role, and it’s the most rewarding work I’ve done in my life. Right now I only do this work a handful of hours a week-not enough to pay the bills by any means-and still I’m not sure how much more I could handle.
What the rock conversation helped me realize is that I would rather continue to grow into this role at my own pace than shy away from the challenge, whatever that looks like. This work is what I was begging for, truly. It’s hard in all the right ways. It gives me an outlet for the love and passion I feel for life at large.
I want to keep knowing about rocks, and learning about myself, and growing in my capacity to love and understand and carry. I want to dig deep and do the work it takes to continue to show up for myself and my students.
I want to be the boulder on the trail, a stepping stone.