By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 2025

BASHŌ:

touching an ancient boulder

This stone—older than all words ever spoken.

What does it remember?

CHARLES:

Two billion years of cooling from magma.

These crystals locked in the matrix—

moments when chaos found its pattern.

BASHŌ:

The rock holds fire and time equally.

CHARLES:

pointing

This was once seafloor.

All this granite towering above us

once lay beneath ancient waves.

BASHŌ:

What teaches the mountain

to dream of being ocean?

CHARLES:

Pressure. Millions of years.

Sediments settling grain by grain,

compressed into this single band

I can cover with my thumb.

BASHŌ:

running his palm across weathered surface

Feel these cracks—

where winter enters stone,

year after year.

CHARLES:

Frost wedging.

Water finding every weakness,

expanding when it freezes

until even granite surrenders.

BASHŌ:

The mountain yields to patient water.

CHARLES:

brushing lichens from a crevice

These tiny organisms eat stone,

making soil

one microscopic bite at a time.

BASHŌ:

The smallest teacher

humbles the mightiest student.

CHARLES:

Water opens the crack,

ice widens it,

lichen moves in—

slow transformation.

BASHŌ:

settling

Mountain becomes valley becomes forest.

CHARLES:

Nothing permanent, nothing lost.

The stone shows us what we fear most—

complete letting go.

BASHŌ:

pausing at a fault line

Where the earth decided to break

rather than bend further.

CHARLES:

After millennia of building pressure,

sometimes the honest response

is to split cleanly.

BASHŌ:

placing a rounded pebble carefully

This wanderer has traveled far

from its birth mountain.

CHARLES:

Shaped by rivers,

polished by encounters.

BASHŌ:

Do you think stones dream in different seasons—

ice ages as brief winters?

CHARLES:

Maybe they’re fully present

to each grain of sand that sculpts them,

each moment of pressure

over deep time.

BASHŌ:

standing

The stone teaches what the heart resists.

CHARLES:

How to hold and release simultaneously.

How to be shaped

by everything that touches us.

BASHŌ:

Shall we carry some witnesses?

CHARLES:

selecting three smooth stones

Only what we can return to the mountain

when our words are finished.

BASHŌ:

Walking with deep time in our pockets.