This piece belongs to A Human Geography of the Self, a series that reads my own life through the concepts geographers use to understand how people and places make one another. It draws on my doctoral and master’s work and on my thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez.
“The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait.”
There was a rock in Loreto that became my friend. I am aware of how that sounds. It was a low shelf of pale stone near the water where I sat each evening of my thirty days alone, and somewhere in the second week I stopped thinking of it as scenery and started thinking of it as a presence. It held the day’s heat into the dark. It had a worn place that fit my body. When I left it each night I found myself saying a quiet goodbye, and when I returned each evening something in me settled, the way it settles when you reach a person you trust. The rock had been there for ten thousand years before me, and it knew how to wait. I felt, sitting on it, that it was teaching me something about waiting too.
For most of my life I would have dismissed this as a lonely woman projecting feeling onto an inert object. Then I found that geography takes the liveliness of matter seriously, stone included, and that a whole field has formed around the idea that the nonhuman world acts upon us in ways we have been trained to overlook. This post is about listening to stone, and about why that phrase names something real, demanding, and finally a matter of justice.
The Liveliness of Matter
The thinker who opened this door for many of us is the political theorist Jane Bennett, whose idea of vibrant matter (the proposal that physical matter is lively and active, with a capacity to affect the world, rather than being dead, passive stuff) reshaped how geographers regard the material world. Bennett (2010) argues that things we treat as inert, including metals and minerals, possess their own vitality and their own small powers, and that what we call agency arises from the interplay of many human and nonhuman forces rather than belonging to humans alone. Reading her, I understood that my rock was not a backdrop to my retreat. It was a participant in it.
Geographers took this conviction and tested it against the most stubbornly solid thing they could find, which is stone itself. Edensor (2011), studying the weathering and repair of a three-hundred-year-old church in Manchester, demonstrates that even building stone is mutable and continuously emergent, worked upon by water, frost, pollution, and time, so that the apparently fixed fabric of the church is forever changing through the agency of nonhuman forces (Edensor, 2011). His argument undid my assumption that solidity means stillness. The stone of that church, he shows, is an ongoing event rather than a finished fact, held in being only through constant relation and repair (Edensor, 2011). My rock, too, was an event in slow motion, not a thing.
Deep Time and the Constant Wobbling
What I felt on that warm shelf of stone, the sense of being in the presence of something vastly patient, has a name in this literature as well. Valtonen and Pullen (2021), writing about their bodily encounters with rocks across the world, describe stone as lively and agentic, holding the capacity to affect us, to stop us, to slow our hurried movements and invite us to sit and feel the ground (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). They draw on the idea that what looks like permanence is really a constant wobbling, the slow, ceaseless geological movement that surpasses human perception because it unfolds across billions of years, so that the contrast between geological time and our own busy hours becomes almost unbearable to hold (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021).
Their most startling move reaches into the body, and it carries forward something I wrote in an earlier post in this series about the body as an ecosystem. Valtonen and Pullen (2021) remind us, through the deep history of mineralization that first made bone, that the human skeleton is itself a geological achievement, so that we might think of ourselves as creatures partly made of stone, with no clean separation of flesh from earth (Valtonen & Pullen, 2021). I sat on that rock in Loreto carrying a skeleton that was, in the longest view, kin to it. The geos was inside me as much as beneath me. Listening to stone, it turns out, is partly listening to myself.
What a Stone Can Do
The anthropologist Hugh Raffles offers the question that has stayed with me longest. Rather than asking what a stone is, he asks what a stone can do, and the asking changes everything. Raffles (2012) answers that a stone can endure and can change, can wound and can heal, can hold a person’s memories, and can serve, in its long silence, as a kind of teacher (Raffles, 2012). He found that swapping the nouns we pin on stones for verbs let the stones step out of their supposed deadness and into the light as active, protean things (Raffles, 2012).
This is exactly what my rock did. It endured, holding its place against the sea. It changed, warming and cooling with the day. It healed, in the plain sense that sitting on it each evening mended something in me. And it taught, without a word, the patience of a thing that measures time in epochs. Raffles gave me permission to take my own experience at face value. The rock was doing something. I was right to listen.
The Politics Underneath the Stone
I want to be careful here, because listening to stone can curdle into a gentle mysticism that ignores how the earth has been used as a weapon. Geographers have insisted on the harder edge. Griffiths (2025), writing on the colonisation of Palestine, develops the idea of the geos (the domain of the geological, the soil and rock and mineral, treated in Western thought as lifeless and therefore available for extraction). Drawing on the work of Kathryn Yusoff and others, he shows how the very category of nonlife has been used to render both land and certain human lives as inert, commodifiable, and expendable, so that geology and colonial violence have advanced together (Griffiths, 2025). Yusoff’s argument, which he builds upon, is that every account of a shared human geological age erases the Black and Indigenous death that extraction has always required (Griffiths, 2025).
This stops me, and it should. To treat stone as dead is not a metaphysical error alone. It has been a license for dispossession, the same logic that treats land as empty and peoples as obstacles. And I have to add a note of humility that my own position demands. The recognition that stone and land are alive and relational, which Western theory now presents as a discovery, is knowledge that Indigenous peoples have carried for millennia. As a settler scholar sitting on a rock by the Sea of Cortez, I am arriving late to something others have always known, and the honest posture is to listen rather than to claim. Listening to stone, done well, includes listening to who was already listening.
What the Rock Taught Me
So I have stopped apologizing for my friendship with a shelf of pale stone in Loreto. The geography gives me language for it, and more than language, a responsibility. Matter is lively. Stone acts, endures, and teaches. The earth is not the dead backdrop I was raised to see, and the habit of calling it dead has done real harm to land and to people alike. To listen to stone is to practise an attention that refuses the lie of inertness, the lie that anything, earthly or human, is mere material to be used and discarded.
On my last evening I sat on the rock for a long time and said goodbye properly. I pressed my hand to the worn place that fit my body and felt the day’s heat moving back out of the stone and into me, an exchange between two slow and patient things. The rock had waited ten thousand years and would wait ten thousand more, indifferent to my small visit and somehow generous within it. It taught me that I am not separate from the world, that my bones are its cousins, and that the practice of listening, to stone, to land, to one another, is the beginning of treating the living world as the living thing it has always been. I came home from the desert knowing how to wait a little better. A rock taught me that. I am still grateful.
References
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Edensor, T. (2011). Entangled agencies, material networks and repair in a building assemblage: The mutable stone of St Ann’s Church, Manchester. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36(2), 238–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00421.x
Griffiths, M. (2025). Geopower, geos and the colonisation of Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 51(2), Article e70049. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70049
Raffles, H. (2012). Twenty-five years is a long time. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 526–534. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01158.x
Valtonen, A., & Pullen, A. (2021). Writing with rocks. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(2), 506–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12579
