If I stand at my kitchen sink, I have a perfect view of my neighbor’s backyard. But “yard” is a misnomer here: the back part of his property has little grass, and is instead dominated by an enormous rock. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at this rock in the four years I’ve lived in my house, and I feel no closer to understanding its exact contours. Sometimes it appears to be one monolithic entity that has developed crevices over time; other times, it seems like a multitude of rocks resting atop of or nestled into one another. Though it isn’t balancing per se, something about its most striking feature, which is––and sorry to use technical language here––its simple hugeness reminds me of one of my favorite rocks, Krishna’s Butterball, a 250-ton boulder in Mahabalipuram, India, which balances itself precariously on a tiny base on top of a steep stone slope.

Until a few years ago, I would have likely dismissed rocks as one of nature’s least interesting offerings. Trees are statuesque and life-giving; we can identify with the way they change and grow through the seasons, the way you can measure their age by the lines they accrue. To stand at the shore of a sea or a lake is to consider its vast unseen ecosystem. Plunging into their depths, you feel weightless and intoxicated. Bursts of technicolor flowers, the delicate flittering of bird wings, an expanse of burnt orange desert: all seem at first glance infinitely more appealing than an entity used frequently in similes for boredom and idiocy, like “dumb as a rock,” an insult which first appeared around the mid-nineteenth century. (In fact, using a rock as a pejorative stretches back even further: “You blocks, you stones, you worse-than-senseless things!” Marullus berates common Romans in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.) This is why the Pet Rock toy from the 1970s was funny: there’s nothing you can do with a rock!

Or so I thought, until I saw the many things people and animals did with my neighbor’s rock: a local indoor-outdoor cat chasing squirrels up it; teenage male students from the haredi yeshiva’s adjacent property laughing and practically sliding down it; wild turkeys awkwardly stumbling around it; my neighbor standing atop it, staring out into the distance like a king surveying all that is his. On one of side of the rock is a plaque only visible from behind my neighbor’s house or through a window in his living room, which lists the names of sixteen local men who met on the rock in the summer of 1873 to organize something called the Church Congress in the United States (a book about my neighborhood’s history tells me that the Church Congress was “an annual gathering of Episcopal clergy and laymen at which distinguished speakers were heard on a variety of theological, liturgical, and related subjects as a prelude to lively discussion and the exchange of diverse points of view.” Fun!).

The rock began to work its peculiar magic on me in 2016, when I read a short news item about the British artist Tracey Emin. “Stoned Love: Why Tracey Emin Married a Rock,” was the headline, and, being interested in humans who marry inanimate objects (as one ought to be), I clicked on it. Elements of the story were predictably quirky––Emin wore her father’s white funereal shroud for the ceremony, which took place outside her studio in the south of France––but I found her descriptions of her life partner surprisingly moving. “Somewhere on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not going anywhere,” Emin told The Art Newspaper of her large, volcanic, lichen-covered spouse. “It will be there, waiting for me.” In another interview, she called it “my anchor.”

This odd but entrancing news story made me recall an earlier instance of slab love from my life. I had spent the winter vacation of my freshman year of college commuting about an hour from my parents’ house in suburban Connecticut to a mammoth hospital complex in Long Island, where I was being treated for anorexia. This was in the pre-smart phone days, so I had to listen to whatever I’d preprogrammed onto my iPod, which was mostly music my much-cooler dorm roommate had turned me on to. One of the songs was Peter Tosh’s “I Am That I Am,” which is how God introduces himself to Moshe in the book of Exodus. The meaning of the Hebrew is actually uncertain but thought to be either the song’s title, “I Will Be What I Will Be” or “I Am Who I Am,” all enigmatic tautologies that manage to feel, for me, meditative and mind-blowing. In the song, Tosh sings, “I am the rock of the ages / You cannot move I at all.” What a fitting image for the divine, I thought: constant, immovable, timeless. Such a concept of steadfastness acted as an immediate balm on my battered soul; the “dumbness” of the rock, conceived of previously as stupidity, now looked like wise silence, and its needlessness like self-sufficiency.

It isn’t surprising to me, therefore, that, in many religions, God is compared to the humble rock. One of a number of epithets for God in Judaism is maoz tzur or tzur Yisrael: “strong rock” or “rock of Israel.” (The former is the title of a popular Hanukkah melody.) David and other psalmists are constantly calling God a rock. “Truly He is my rock and deliverance, my haven; I shall never be shaken.” (Imagine never being shaken!) Before Moses dies, he gives a rousing speech to the Israelites, in which he refers to God as “The Rock!––whose deeds are perfect.” For their part, many Christians interpret a line from Psalm 118––“the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone”––to be about Jesus, who was persecuted by the Jewish establishment in the ancient world (this is leaving aside all the other rock imagery in the New Testament, though less of that seems to be explicit God-as-stone metaphors).

If you imagine God can be a rock, it isn’t too much of a stretch to begin seeing rocks themselves as sacred. At the center of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem sits what’s known as the Foundation Stone, believed to be the exact spot where God began to fashion the earth. “When the Holy One, blessed be He, was about to create the world, He detached one precious stone from underneath His throne of glory and plunged it into the abyss,” the mystical Zohar, the main esoteric text in the study of Kabbalah, states. “One end of it remained fastened therein, while the other end stood out above. Out of the latter the world started, spreading itself to the right and left and into all directions.” (Early Christian sources describe Jews on pilgrimage to the Foundation Stone, which sits at the site of their destroyed Temple, weeping and tearing their clothing.) Meanwhile, on hajj, Muslims vie to kiss fragments of al-Hajar al-Aswad, the “Black Stone of Mecca,” a rock of debated origin––some say it’s the fragment of a meteor––which tradition holds was embedded into the side of the Kaaba by Muhammad himself. (Some Muslims find this practice iffy: “I hope i dont get down voted for this but kissing the black stone seems like idol worship to me,” one skeptic wrote on a subreddit for progressive Muslims.) To the Anangu people of Australia, ruddy Uluru is sacred because it was created during what’s known as the Dreaming, the pre-creation period when ancestral beings formed the earth. It isn’t the same rock, of course, but when I think of the white Europeans confronted with such a symbol of a seemingly untamable, mysterious land and the vast history into which they’ve violently inserted themselves, I’m reminded of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the eerie 1970s Peter Weir film in which a group of schoolgirls in prim white dresses become intoxicated with the aura of the titular rock in Victoria and vanish into its crevices.

In 2020, I interviewed a self-described “hermit” named Karen Karper Fredette for a piece on how the spiritual tradition of hermeticism could help people in the midst of pandemic-induced isolation, not suspecting that it would lead me back to rocks. This was a season of life in which I was feeling particularly exhausted: I was driving my eldest about an hour each way to school every day (it’s a long story), and, because social distancing restrictions were still in place, spending much of his school day wandering around local parks and sitting in my car; in the afternoons I’d fight through New York City traffic and then conduct interviews for the piece late into the night, my feet so tired they tingled. It was the opposite life I imagined Fredette having. For starters, she’d spent thirty years as a nun in the Poor Clare tradition, one of the strictest orders of cloistered nuns in existence; many Poor Clares wake in the middle of the night to pray, restrict their speech to only necessary utterances (excepting during a prescribed recreation hour), and eschew shoes.

But Fredette felt monastery life wasn’t truly conducive to solitude­­­––though the nuns are taciturn, there are always other people around––so she received special dispensation to go live in a cabin in remote West Virginia to seek solitary prayer. A few years later, in what can only be described as a meet-cute crying out for a rom-com adaptation, she met Paul, a priest, and the two fell in love and got married. They now live on a rural property near the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina and run a newsletter for hermits and spiritual solitaries. It’s an extraordinary story, but what drew me in the most was Fredette’s description of a giant rock on her property that she’d named Petra. When she was feeling particularly adrift, she said, she liked to go out and sit on Petra, and ask for the rock’s help. (For a cradle Catholic, Fredette could be fascinatingly animistic.) I joked with Fredette that I wanted a high-res photographic portrait of Petra that I could hang on my wall and gaze at in my own times of need; my thoughts drifted to René Magritte’s late rock paintings, specifically the eerie “The Invisible World,” in which a boulder stands out a window contemplating (is this possible?) an expansive view of the sea.

In late November of that year, when the article was published, I got my first glimpse of Petra. In one of the pictures accompanying the piece, Paul and Karen stood atop their bulwark, gazing out ahead of them, away from the camera. The rock was greener than I expected, with leaves scattered here and there across the top. I realized I’d been picturing something dry and unadorned, because in my imagination rocks are always clean, like they’ve just been washed in water, and cool to the touch. Gazing at Paul and Karen and Petra, I wanted to wander out into their yard and stand beside them, or maybe even stretch out across her, my head upon her like Jacob’s on his stone before he slept and dreamt his famous dream. I wondered if maybe, one day, my neighbor might awake to find me nestled in one of his backyard crooks, the breeze on my face and the chill stone beneath my skin, finally at rest.