The Niagara Escarpment landscape here at Hope Ness and in the Hope Bay Forest Provincial Park nature reserve has many natural features well worth appreciating and protecting. I am fortunate to live, literally, in the midst of it. Among that wonderful diversity of features are numerous moss-covered rocks left here thousands of years ago when the vast ice-age glaciers began to melt and recede. At dusk, their moss blanket takes on a luminous glow that I find spell-binding. As I walk the Bruce Trail in the woods near my home, I always stop beside beside one large rock and marvel at the little garden of flowers and other small plants at its top that somehow survive the cold winters.

“There’s life in that rock,” I have said, stopping there for a while, imagining the stories it could tell of its creation, and, yes, the spirits within.

There is another rock, though, that is perhaps more special. I call it ‘my touchstone.’ If that sounds like I’ve somehow taken possession of it, I guess that’s true in some sense. When Buddy, my beautiful canine, German Shepherd came to live with me, and then a short time later, Sophie the mischievous Cockapoo, we three started walking north down Cathedral Drive. There was one of those moss-covered rocks standing alone beside the road, and partially hidden by wild raspberries bushes, tiny maple and ash saplings. The little trees never got bigger because the municipal plows, mowers, and those infernal machines that whip the young tree growth to an ugly death, wouldn’t allow it.

I suppose too the machinery sometime gets damaged because the rock is easily overlooked during the growing season, or covered with snow in winter. I get it; and to that extent, I understand.

Still, I was surprised and shocked to discover last Friday morning about 9:30 my touchstone had been demolished.

With few exceptions, my dogs and I have walked down Cathedral Drive every morning after breakfast for five years, or thereabouts, to the touchstone. Usually it’s just as the sun is rising over the woods to the east. Between the road and those woods, a former farm field that hasn’t been worked for a long time is filling up with wild apple trees as the field is left to revegetate naturally. When we reach the rock I put my right hand on its moss blanket. My left hand holds Sophie’s leash. Buddy stays close by. Often, especially when someone in my family was not well or for other reasons needed spiritual help, or I was myself feeling not so good, I pray; usually the Lord’s Prayer – because that’s what I grew up with, and I’m a creature of habit – with some additional words.

Sometimes, I let the rock inspire my spiritual imagination; or should I say, ‘horizons;’ because we are, above all, spiritual beings, and it is no small matter to go there and grow. Our spiritual journey is the most important one we will ever take. So, an extended opening of unknowable depth near where the rock met the earth, became a portal to the Cosmos, and beyond that, the Great Mystery, which is what I call God in my open-minded way.

And then suddenly at 9:30 am Friday morning, there it was: in a few minutes at best broken into pieces large and small, each exposed and strangely raw and white in the morning light, except for the one partially covered by what was left of the moss blanket. Further along Cathedral Drive other rocks that must have been causing problems for municipal equipment were also broken up.

“So, this is what a rock looks like when it dies,” I think just now, as I write this and look at the photos I took this morning. But, on second thought, I don’t think so. It has taken on a different way of being, as I will when my time comes. And that gives me much consolation.

This morning, Saturday, November, 4, 2023, the dogs and I took our morning walk as usual. I note the date here because, after all, that rock was millions of years old, and it only seemed right. Buddy, off leash, was the first to reach the site. I could see he was surprised, as he carefully explored the ground where the rock had been, and then the pieces, large and small, before he looked back at me as I approached.

So, there it is; but I will continue to go to the place, pay homage to what remains, and quietly say the words I need to say.