In Defense of the Patient Ones

Today, January 7, is National Old Rock Day, which sounds like a celebration invented by geology professors and sentient mountains—but it turns out to be surprisingly relevant to how the world works, how stories work, and how some planets refuse to be rushed.

Old rocks are not just “rocks that forgot to update.” They are archives. Before paper, before ink, before language itself, Earth recorded its history in stone. Every layer is a sentence. Every fault line is a plot twist. Sedimentary rocks quietly stack decades into paragraphs. Metamorphic rocks rewrite themselves under pressure. Igneous rocks arrive dramatically, refuse footnotes, and cool only when they’re ready.

Rocks don’t explain themselves. They wait.

That waiting matters. Old rocks are proof that meaning doesn’t always announce itself on arrival. Sometimes it needs time, compression, heat, and a few failed interpretations before it becomes obvious. Entire civilizations have misread stones at first glance—thinking them inert, useless, or merely decorative—only to later discover that they shaped trade routes, rituals, architecture, and survival itself.

I have a perfect example: As documented on the TV show “Mysteries Unearthed,” a man found a stone tablet in 1913 that had a bunch of characters on it. For decades, he used it as a paving stone in his courtyard where countless footsteps trampled over the writing on it.

Eventually, in 2024, it auctioned off for over a million dollars when it was determined to be a Samaritan stone, over 1,500 years old, that held their version of the (ten) commandments. Oops.

Which brings me neatly to one of my current works in progress about a planet I invented which has gemstone continents, but more importantly, it is a world that understands what old rocks already know: pressure reveals, not destroys. In my world, gems are not resources to be extracted but memories to be listened to. Attempts to exploit them backfire—not out of vengeance, but out of physics-with-a-personality. The planet doesn’t hurry. It doesn’t explain itself to invaders. It lets them misunderstand first.

That is very old-rock behavior.

Writing about his world has required the same patience stones demand. The world didn’t arrive fully formed. It layered itself. Continents settled. Symbolism crystallized. Characters learned (slowly) that meaning doesn’t respond well to force. If you rush it, you get fractures. If you listen, you get resonance.

Old rocks don’t chase relevance. They outlast it.

They remind us that endurance is not the opposite of change—it’s the condition that makes change legible. That something can be ancient and still actively shaping the future. That the quiet things often carry the deepest charge.

So today, if you pass a rock that looks unremarkable, consider that it may be holding a few million years of unresolved subtext. And if you’re building a world, writing a book, or becoming someone new—take a note from the stones.

Layer slowly. Hold pressure gracefully.
And trust that what’s forming knows exactly how long it needs.