The Pursuit of Balance

A nice little post at The Last Word on Nothing reminded me of the ever-changing cairn garden near one of the old lime kilns in the Pogonip near UCSC. The photo at left, taken in the fall, doesn't have enough contrast to do the cairn-builders justice. The cairns are always changing, sometimes incorporated into mazes, sometimes riding the limbs of surrounding trees as well as inhabiting the ground.

Follow the links in Nijhuis's post to more wonderful balanced stone sculptures. The beautiful, fanciful, and sometimes astounding ones by Adrian Gray were new to me. I recommend going to his site and watching the two BBC videos of Gray working with stones on the beach. Goldsworthy, less a rock-balancing specialist, is always amazing.

Michelle Nijhuis, "The Pursuit of Balance"

Top of the story:

My neighborhood, as I've mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money's on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it's more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup.

"Just Google it," he finally said, giving us a beatific smile.

So I did, and found that yes, a bunch of people gathered in Flagstaff this past Sunday to stack stones. It seems to be habit-forming: this was the third international gathering of stone balancers, and balancers have even written an "Art Manifesto of Stone Balance" with ethical guidelines. (No glue, no bolts, no wires. Just gravity.) For some, such as artists Adrian Gray and Andy Goldsworthy, stone balancing is high art. For others, it's a meditative practice or just a prankish pastime ...

[Photo in Nijhuis's post from Flickr user jayul.]