On Old Stone Walls

Since I neglected to get any photos of the stone walls themselves, here is one I took from the Maryland welcome center instead.

A few days ago, I drove from Pennsylvania to Virginia to visit a friend. One thing I noticed while driving through Virginia was the great number of old stone walls. These walls didn’t have anything particularly special about them. They were flat stones stacked a few feet high without any kind of mortar holding them together and looked like something you might find in a fairy tale, which is probably why I liked them.

Anyway, on the drive back to Pennsylvania, I started thinking about those walls. When I had mentioned them to my friend, she told me that a lot of them had been been around since at least the time of the Civil War, which, if you’re counting, is over 150 years ago.

It’s striking to me how long these walls have lasted. Quite honestly, there’s something to be said for the value of putting effort into an endeavor that takes a lot of work but yields something that lasts for so many years. An endeavor like building a stone wall means a lot of hard work, time, and sweat. It means lifting stones over and over again and stacking them correctly because a wall that falls over as soon as someone pokes it the wrong way isn’t much of a wall at all.

In the same way, crafting a work of art—whether it be a story, poem, or painting—takes a lot of time and hard work. The last thing you want to happen is to write a story and terribly confuse a reader because you rushed in the making of the story. With good, hard work, shortcuts often don’t exist. That can be really annoying at times because we like shortcuts, but there’s so much value in putting the effort into something that will last and that’s just plain beautiful—rather than going the quick route and emerging on the other side with nothing worth showing.

Many beautiful things exist because of the time, effort and dedication that their creator was willing to put into them. Just because whatever you’re working on isn’t good immediately and just because it takes you a long time to write the story or the poem or to paint the picture—or even stack up five feet of a stone wall—doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. So think of those stone walls as an encouragement to keep going even when the act of creating is hard and takes a long time