#stonekin

From an animal perspective, being a stone is about time. When I shift as granite, the world slows. I feel myself still and root in place, and all notions of cellular needs and thoughts fade into distant obscurity. I observe the world around me without judgment or interpretation, noting movement and sound as one might regard wind on the ocean. I anticipate how my surroundings might change with the seasons, as though I may blink and see the flowers change to snow. I feel the rise and fall of temperature, the gentle brush of erosion, the molten life of the earth beneath me and the gravity that binds me to it. I feel the trees around me grow, bend, and wither, the constellations shift, and the cliffs return to the sea. I am awake and asleep all at once, dreaming and lucid, both motionless and full of all the potential energy of my chemical composition. I experience the past, present, and future almost simultaneously– time stretches out around me, no less tangible than right, left, up, or down. It is an intensely calming state, and one that connects me to the earth in a much deeper, more universal way than anything else. Shifting as granite feels like being home. If I am heightened or upset, I can simply watch a video of a volcanic eruption and immediately feel my heart rate slow and my mind find peace.

Stones are people to me, and always have been. My rock collection is part of my family just as much as my houseplants and pets are. I understand them on an intuitive level, and holding them feels like a hug. Some have been with me since childhood, and others I've picked up along the way. Some stay with me a while before I put them back, and some are permanent residents. Most would not be very impressive or interesting to others; I find rocks based on interpersonal chemistry, not human value. I am largely disinterested in crystals, their uniformity makes them feel like meeting a beautiful person with an empty head, and refraction of light is not a property I relate to. I am instead drawn to complexity, to stones with evidence of the years of reshaping and change they've endured. I feel they have stories to tell me.

A stone does not have emotions and sensations the way an animal does, but it does feel. It is concerned mainly with six things: movement, pressure, abrasion, fracture, temperature, and chemical reaction. It does not have opinions on these things should they happen gradually or on a small scale, they simply define the nature of its existence and are felt almost the way an animal senses its own bodily processes, observed the way one might idly watch bugs on a log. Should a change occur dramatically, however, the stone may take notice, and its reaction depends on how unlikely that change is. An igneous rock, for example, would find it natural to be melted and re-formed, while a sedimentary rock might find those temperatures confusing but have a great affinity for drastic erosion. The most common reasons for a stone to be confused are extreme displacement and fracture, most frequently from mining but also from natural processes like glacial movement. Smaller stones tend to adapt quickly, but larger ones may take much longer– many glacial erratics are still unsure where they are, for example. Mined areas in particular are usually traumatized. I can relate my own traumas to the feeling of having hidden parts of me removed and destroyed, and doing spiritual work with mines with that background has helped both me and them better understand and process those feelings. The granite mine where I awakened to my stone nature, however, was on an exposed mountaintop and experienced being mined as a form of expected erosion. Finding a mine unbothered by the process was a new perspective, and I would like to go back there someday.

In contrast to historical opinions in the community, having a kintype like this has never felt like an implausibility to me. I have never felt the need to question whether "life" is necessary for an identity, because all matter is in some way alive to me. We can say that life moves and reproduces and thinks, sure, but no test can show us where consciousness comes from. If a plant can think without a nervous system (and we know they do), why couldn't a stone think without cells? Among physicists this is even a popular theory, that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and life is just matter with agency. Broadly this is called panpsychism, but my preferred term is quantum animism (the concept is explained well in this theoretical physics essay though I disagree with a lot of his extrapolations for various reasons). It is gratifying to know as a science-minded person that this part of me is no less explainable than any other from a physics perspective.

Overall, granite is a very comforting and spiritually meaningful kintype for me, but it's also one I need to be careful around sometimes. It's all too easy to slip into seeing the big, beautiful picture of the universe and forget that right now I have animal agency, and the opportunity to do all the little messy activities that make this kind of life so interesting and fulfilling. I like being grounded from within and stopping to watch the world go by, but I need to fly, too.