Sometime leading up to Thanksgiving last year I started to write a post based on this photograph. I really liked the photograph, but I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I began, “There are two kinds of people, those who stack rocks and those who kick them down.” There’s a triangular piece of dirt with a tree trunk in the middle belonging to St. Timothy’s Catholic Church that one walks past to reach the back entrance of the market. On the majority of my trips I pass that spot. For the longest time I would find a delightful miracle as I turned. Rocks stacked artfully on rocks. But then I noticed that very often the next day there wouldn’t be two rocks standing. The whole design was turned into a jumble of rocks and dirt and disorder. I tried to set some of the designs right, but found that I lacked both the skill and the necessary patience. Then I notice that the rocks went unstacked, and stayed unstacked for several months.

The original post I deleted because it seemed very negative. When I found this photograph earlier this evening I realized that my statement had not been true. I couldn’t stack the rocks, but neither was I capable of kicking them down. The two kinds of people turned out to be a gross exaggeration. There were people who stacked rocks and there were certainly people who kicked them down, but these two groups were the exception to the rule. The groups may have been large, but the more I stared at this photograph, thinking of all the surprises and all the failures, I realized that each group was probably very small.

The person who stacked the rocks either gave up or moved on. The person who kicked them down now leaves his initials scratched into walls or doors, or breaks flowering plants. I think the vast majority of people simply ignored the rocks. It bothered me because I saw the miracle in them, the unlikely beauty. And it’s taken all this time to realize how wrong I was, how wrong I may still be. How do we encourage beauty without condemning ugliness?