A SMALL SMOOTH ROCK.

https://www.cherokee.org/

May 8, 1990

This morning I got up about 6:30 AM, got dressed and took a walk to look for a small smooth rock. My friend Don Rich had talked to me on the phone several times, first to find out where the Poncas had their present-day reservation. I told him to look in north central Oklahoma, very close to the Cherokee reservation where he grew up. He hung up and then the phone rang again in less than a minute. Don was excited, saying that he’d found it, included in a patch of land that included the other tribes of Osage, Kaw, Otoe and Tonkawa.

He then said, “Repeat after me... My mother, my grandmother, and all my relations.”

After I spoke the words, he said that I would need a small smooth rock...a stone that I picked as mine. He would help me be accepted by the Indians, protect me from dangers by making an amulet. He said he knew the ways of doing it, wrapping the stone in sage, tying it up in a special way. I was to call him when I found my special rock, and he said I should start looking right then.

As I left the house and turned my face toward the eastern rising sun I reviewed my preconceived idea for locating such a stone. I would hike up to the top of Nichol Nob mountain there in Point Richmond and, with the wind in my ears and standing before a view of the entire Bay Area, I would suddenly spot a beautiful object at my feet. I would reach down and grab the precious smooth-rock jewel.

On the way to the mountain, a fairly modest hill, actually––you can see an overall view in my movie Morgan's Cake, which was filmed partly at that location––I walked the short three blocks it took to get there.

Rounding a corner where a new house had just been built, on a spectacular lot that looked out at the far away Golden Gate Bridge across the Bay, I noticed a flowerbed full of agate-like stones. The different colors of the rocks attracted my attention and I reached down to examine one of them. I grabbed a small brown rock, slippery to the touch, with a few vein-like cracks, some fissures in its side, as if it had been boiling before it rapidly cooled. In one side of the rock there was an intrusion of white, a small vein that might have been some sort of quartz. It felt cold and sort of foreign in my hand, but as I kept holding it, walking the rest of the way to the hill, it warmed up.

No one was around as began to trudge up the steep side of Nichol Nob, walking along a narrow path that was surrounded on both sides by golden California grass about two feet high. I caught my breath about half way up, stopping at just about the exact spot where I had filmed my son Morgan Schmidt-Feng and his then girlfriend Rachel Pond in 1987. It was fun to see how the spot looked at different times of year, different growths of grass, different weather conditions out on the bay. I was still holding my rock and it had began to feel like a satisfying extension of my fingers. I turned it around a couple of times in my fingers and then headed up the rest of the way.

Reaching the top I noticed I wasn’t as winded as usual. In fact it felt as if I’d simply wished myself to the top without doing any of the actual work of climbing. I gripped my rock inside the knuckles of my right hand, with my thumb holding it tightly in place. It was the perfect throwing rock, just the right size. Relaxing my grip I let it fall back to the bottom of my pocket and took up the job of locating the rock I had come after, some rock on the top of the mountain (hill) was what I had expected would be “the one.”

A few caught my eye, but nothing I picked up and examined really measured up to the leathery brown richness of the rock that I’d already found. I did place one grey rock in my pocket, just so I would at least have some example of the best rock I could find up there that day.

Heading home, looking one more time in the flower pit where the first rock had been picked up, a quick glance convinced me that I had selected the best one. The walk home had the same aura as my flight to the top of Nichol Nob. Suddenly I was at my front door, searching for my house key.

Back inside I realized that by focusing on a rock, taking my mind off of each step toward my goal, I had somehow transcended the amount of physical effort I normally associated with the journey. Had the rock given me energy? By holding the rock in my hand, feeling its smoothness against my fingers, keeping that focus, I had somehow switched the signals to my brain. Instead of telling myself to keep moving along with each step, I had forced myself to enjoy the beauty and sensuality of the object that I was twirling and exploring in my hand. And my preconceived notion of where to actually find the rock was bypassed by the reality of finding it earlier. A good lesson: It’s important to always keep one’s eyes open during the process of living, staying in the present as best as one can. So I had my rock and a few new thoughts to deal with, all by 8:30 AM!

(Excerpted from "INSHTA THEAMBA ('BRIGHT EYES') AND THE INDIAN RING,” by Rick Schmidt ©2024.

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(Lots of interesting vintage amulets for sale online).

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