My husband and I have been married for 49 years, and one constant throughout all our seasons together has been our favored spare time activity, which is taking a ride on unexplored back country roads! And this for 2 reasons: it’s always been affordable, and we are both in love with meadows, farms, and out of the way places. On these rides I am so often drawn to stone walls, so ample in my New England environment. I respect and admire their durability and their silent witness to the farmers who built them out of the rocks their plows inevitably excavated as a yearly Spring chore. In New England, stones and rocks are perennials! Just when youthink you’ve managed to remove them all from your fields, a new crop of them comes up every planting season.

Walls, over the course of human history, have been built to protect and to defend, and also to dilineate…to create a sense of belonging, as in, “this is where I live and clear my land, and that is where you live and clear your land!” Do walls built as good fences make good neighbors, as Robert Frost’s neighbor insisted? That may very well be an eternal debate… for certain there is a delicate balance between the belief that walls are structures that create borders, a sense of order…and the view that they are barriers that create division and a sense of “my side/your side” mentality. Sometimes both viewpoints are valid, but there’s no denying that stone walls as we come upon them in rural areas are , as George Ellison declares in a recent article, “an undemanding, stable presence.”

They are like magnets for me!! I’ll frequently stop the car, pause, and imagine the farmer who built them, and sadly accept that so many are in disrepair, in need of being reclaimed from the woods that have overtaken them. They forever proclaim that someone once cared for this piece of land and for that matter for the wall itself because some are genuine works of art. The land the wall emcompasses knew it was loved…L.M. Montgomery tells us that “places know” this! I think too of the small creatures who reside within them: for them these stones become shields, roofs, and safety.

I believe it is spiritual work to mend a wall. If a wall has been left unattended, the woods, the ivy and the weeds gradually take it over, and when you repair one, mend it, rebuild it…you are saying, “here is a quiet path through…here is a link…here is a salute to the work of the one who built it!”

There are many kinds of walls: psychological ones that can be so hard to break down. There are spiritual walls that hinder growth and maturity. There are powerful prayer walls human beings have utilized to tuck into a stone wall’s openings intentions dear to their hearts. There are healing walls, garden walls: places to go to when in need of rest or soul-repair.

And some kinds of walls have their time and folks finally agree it is time for them to come down.

It is the extravagant month of May, when so much is coming back to life all around us, that even if we are paying close attention, we are bound to miss some of the action! As we live through these Spring moments, give some thoughts to how YOU feel about walls…maybe asking which ones in your life might need repair and which might need to come down altogether. I wish you time to pause and “be” with a stone wall you might come upon this month…perhaps one that needs mending…or one nearby that might serve as a new prayer wall. I hope you see them as a legacy someone left, and that it inspires you to think of the legacy YOU wish to leave behind.

WALLED IN

A snake’s escape from the sun

A chipmonk’s pantry

A keeper of desired outcomes

A hiker’s chair on which to rest

Unwanted field stones…a roof, a shelter

Yeah…what IF these stones could talk?