You can tell by the way crows walk that they’re in touch with things you need to know. But they don’t want to tell them.

When you see geese walking you’d think they didn’t know anything, wouldn’t you? But when you see them flying, or when you listen to them on the water in their flocks and towns, talking, and they still keep talking all the time they fly -- they talk as much as people do, and know more about the other side of the hills -- when you see they flying, that writing, then you wish you could read it!

Not all rocks are equally sensitive. Most basalt doesn’t pay attention. It isn’t listening. It’s still thinking about the fire in the dark, perhaps. Serpentine rock is always sensitive. It’s from both the water and the fire, it moved and flowed through other rocks to come to the air, and it’s always on the point of breaking up, coming apart, turning into dirt. Serpentine listens, and speaks. Flint is a strange rock. It stays locked up. Sandstone is a rock for the hands, they understand one another. We don't have limestone here in the Valley; the Finders bring pieces of it in. What I have seen of it is mortal and intellectual -- it is a rock made out of lives. They say that where the land is made of limestone the rivers run through it in caves underground and don’t come out into the shining. That would be strange. I’d like to see such caves. Granite from the Range of Light is a community of rocks, very beautiful and powerful. When the mica is in it, glittering, like light on the sea, that is a wonderful thing. Obsidian is glass, of course, and so are pumice and the ashrock from around Ama Kulkun. They have the character of glass, the edge and flow, and they hold light. They are dangerous rocks.