You can learn to see. But you have to keep looking.

On agates and God

You can learn to find agates.

Lots of people in these parts collect them, search for them, bend over the water’s edge like prospectors mining for gold, spying for just the right shape, size, and color.

You can watch them. Listen to their stories. Buy a book. Take a class.

Or you can step into the icy cold water and start to look for yourself.

You can find agates on beaches, in forests, on dirt roads, in parking lots. You can buy polished ones in gift shops, shiny and smooth, spirals and bands of ochre, like western canyons. You marvel at the desert sunset in your palm: crimson and saffron, currant and honey, sand and fire swirled together.

If you care about agates—any small, step-over-able ordinary thing, really—younger folks might mock you; your kids especially. They may not understand the mystery. Plenty of people walk, run, or drive over rocks every day and never notice. Life rolls on.

But when you hold the jagged edges in your hand, turning over the treasure, trusting that inside holds a mineraled mystery, colored starbursts like galaxies, you learn not to care what others think. 

You tuck the rock in your pocket and keep going. 

//

People have told me faith is a gift. Sometimes in self-defense, sitting across from me bruised or bitter that they can’t see, or feel, or sense the same. Sometimes in hushed awe, holding my suffering at arm’s length and marveling that anyone could keep showing up to a God, to a church, to a religion, to any transcendent worldview after all that mess. 

I never know how to reply, squirming uncomfortably in my seat. Yes, faith could be a gift, a capacity carved out within, the shape of a soul unsatisfied with appearances. But it could also be a goal, a stubborn desire to seek and see more, a thirst for understanding, a quest to which I devoted my life long ago, captivated by the idea of something more.

What else would you want, or spend your life searching to find, if not the beautiful, the mysterious, the transcendent, the true?

//

Maybe you grow up in a nature-loving family, learning to look for rocks as a child. Maybe a friend shows you their collection, or you see a shiny selection in a store, or as you grow older, you simply start to notice the overlooked things. Stones can call to you by a thousand songs, those sirens of the lakeshore.

Agates have imposters, though. This makes the hunt maddening. The eye is easily fooled. 

You can bring your best guesses to an expert with a discerning eye. They will tell you in an instant whether you’re on the right path or not. The not-quite-true can be beautiful, too, by appearance and name: Mary Ellen Jasper, Banded Flint, Feldspar, Rhyolite. 

But a Lake Superior Agate holds its own, no comparison.

Look for layers, you learn, the banded rings or wild waves. Watch for the waxy surface and the patterned earthy hues: fiery red, burnished orange, amber yellow, milky white. Check that the rock is partly translucent, that it comes to life when wet, since water reveals what the naked eye can’t see. But guard against despair, too, as you’re learning all the ways to know what you find. 

Because the inner joy that explodes when another confirms, yes, you’ve got it—there is nothing that compares. 

//

Last night I learned there were agates on the dirt road near our house. First one rusty red rock under my foot, then another coppery corner sticking out of the sand. I bent down and dug them out with my fingernails, incredulous that the common-rare beauties were always this close, this real. I never knew till now.

I tucked the stones in my pockets, then turned them out on the kitchen counter when I got home. “Road agates!” I crowed to everyone in the house, none of whom cared. “Mom loves rocks,” two kids laughed, eyes rolling.

I wish they could see the beauty; sometimes they do. But mostly, I have learned, it matters more that the marvelous mystery was there all along, waiting for any of us or all of us to find it.

A gift, you might say. Or a lifetime spent looking.