A Novel Way to Appreciate a Landscape Stone
Exploring a good stone using one’s imagination.
By Thomas S. Elias, September, 2023
Of the many ways to appreciate a good viewing stone, one of my favorite ways is to engage the stone. I do this with selected landscape stones by mentally reducing myself to two or three millimeters in height and exploring the features of the stone.
In this case, I selected a Pompira stone from northern Hokkaido in Japan. This sedimentary limestone rock laced with other minerals was naturally eroded to its present condition. It is a large stone 23.4 cm wide, 15.7 cm high, and 12.7 cm deep.
I imagine standing at the head of a trail at the base of this towering West-facing bluff that leads into a narrow canyon. Slipping behind the lowest section of a thin wall of rock, I find a trail that leads to the left and parallels a small creek. After an hour of hiking up a gradual incline, I hear falling water to my right. Not a roar, but a more peaceful rhythmic sound of a small volume of water falling. Finally, I notice a narrow, thread-like waterfall cascading down the face of the bluff. After I climb more, I can see two waterfalls, a taller upper one and a smaller one that flows over a rounded rock face. Sitting and listening to the sound of falling water carries my concerns of the day down a small creek.
My goal today is to explore this towering narrow canyon to see if there is a way I can climb to the top of this weathered bluff. I push on with my hiking stick, stepping over boulders that came tumbling down days, years, or centuries ago. How long did it take to form this fantastic canyonland? Leaving the water behind, I continue onward in the canyon. The incline steepens. The trail stopped at the waterfall and was replaced with scree fields of various-sized rocks. I stopped occasionally to examine some smaller rocks laced with quartz, or is it calcite? Minerals leached from water flowing through these rocks millennia ago formed these veins. Two stones have fascinating patterns. In the backpack, they go. I finally reach the end of this slender box canyon. While eating a late lunch, I scanned the inner wall to see if it could be climbed to reach the bluff top. There is a way, but not a climb, that I should take by myself. A small group with ropes and some essential climbing equipment will be needed.
The next day a friend and I set out in the other direction, hoping to locate a path to the gateway to heaven. An old Indian legend tells of a gateway in these canyonlands, but where? We made a false start, ran into a stone wall, and turned back. The second way was more promising but involved difficult climbing over enormous boulders. At the end of one of our rest stops, we caught a glimpse of light penetrating the wall higher up the canyon. That was sufficient for us to muster our energy and climb higher and higher. We reached a semi-flat area, and at the end was a huge upright, dumbbell-shaped opening with light pouring through the orifice. The space, top to bottom, must have been 100 feet high. This was the gateway to heaven. Standing in front of this enormous bluff, the opening was totally out of sight. It was exhilarating to think about how this formed and its meaning to the indigenous inhabitants here.
Several days later, four of us returned to the narrow canyon of our first visit. We scaled a low sheer wall at the canyon's end and zig-zagged our way to the top. It wasn’t flat but consisted of irregular-shaped large blocks of stone. We walked to the edge and sat silently. The view to the far horizon was spectacular. But my thoughts were on this rock bluff, how and when it formed, and over how many years? Indeed, Chinese scholar John Hay was correct when he wrote about the ancient Chinese belief that rocks are the bones of the earth and that the vital energy in the universe coalesces in rocks.
There are many other viewing stones in our collection whose beauty I admire and that can quickly become a part of in my imagination. This is why I am a collector of remarkable natural rocks.
This stone was displayed at the 8th Hokkaido Suiseki Federation Exhibition in late July 2017 by Mr. Nakayama Genshichi. Nakayama collected this stone and made the base for it. At the end of the exhibition, Nakayama saw us admiring this stone, and to our surprise, he gave it to us. He told us that he had enjoyed this stone very much, and it was time for someone else to enjoy it. Sharing precious viewing stones is one of the joys of Japanese stone appreciation, a Suiseki practice rarely discussed in Western literature.
