Nick Rowney

Well it was three years in the making and each stone was lovingly placed, 30 tons in all. And as I built this wall when ever I got the chance I learn’t a lot, the stones do indeed speak.

I started this wall as a fit 59 year old, strong enough to lift up the 80 kg base stones and stagger round. What I quickly found out was my muscles might have been up to the task but my tendons weren’t and for the next year I learnt how precious the gift of being able to lift a cup of coffee is and wondered if I would ever carve again.

But I digress, it was my cancer that the wall and I discussed and the irony on being well enough to build a stone wall yet have stage 4 cancer was not lost on either the wall or myself. I often asked it unanswerable questions on the fairness of life or whether you could survive through effort alone, but most of all I just asked if each rock should go “there”.

You see I was told that the real expert wall builders ( mine is a dry stone wall so no cement) placed every stone they picked up into the wall, they never put it back on the pile they just knew which one next to place.

The reason behind this is of course that if you are being paid to build a wall there is no money in putting stones back on the pile, but to me it was about the ZEN of it all. Being able to pick and place every stone in the right place seemed so perfect, so …graceful, a test of a true craftsman.

And so I rushed headlong into mastering the building technique, efficiently was the key and I knew that efficiency was the brother of speed. And indeed I did get faster and I started building the wall never putting back a stone, my progress was quite staggering and the wall seemed to jump into life.

That was until I returned to it one weekend and for a moment I just stood and looked. It may have been the light that day, or maybe my mood or even just a reflective moment, what ever it was as I looked my heart sank I couldn’t put my finger on it….it wasn’t right.

And so that day I tore it down, my partner Lorraine who couldn’t see the imperfections couldn’t understand why I was undoing all that work and I am not sure that I did really.

But in my haste to be the ZEN stone mason I had lost my way, I had stopped talking to the stones and had started telling them where they would go, in my efficiency I had forgotten to listen. In my haste I had stopped our conversations and just concentrated on the task at han