The Constant Rock

by Diane Challenor

I once had a dream that the flat sandstone rock in the garden was constant. It was the one thing that could be depended on to remain the same. It was a dream. On waking I realised that nothing in the world is constant.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What is the "silver lining" of all things not being constant? What is the word with the opposite meaning of constant? Possibly, ever changing?

On discovering that the beautiful rock, lodged in the garden may not always be there was a disappointment. I wanted to believe that the rock would stay there, where it had always been and always would be. Putting reality aside, because this is my story and I can make worlds that may or may not exists, I will write the story of the Constant Rock as my imagination suggests.

THE CONSTANT ROCK

Once upon a time there was a rock. It wasn't a big rock nor was it a small rock it was the size of a Galapagos Island turtle turned upside down. It jutted out of the soil in such a way that I could sit on it comfortably with my legs stretched out on the neatly clipped lawn and look across the suburb to the blue blue Pacific Ocean. If you sat there at night you could not see the ocean but you could see the warm lights shining forth from my neighbors' houses. Far away on the distant hill, all lit up like a "show of lights" was the sandstone Romanesque Saint Patrick's Theologian College Building.

You wouldn't stay long sitting on the rock at night because, it was night. Fear. For this was the city and cities are dangerous at night. Or so we believe. Sometimes though I would pause, there in the moonlight, feel the balmy summer's evening air and say out loud, "a coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man only once", then I would take a deep breath and allow myself to sit on the rock, for just a moment, pushing away the fear of the night. Alone in the magnificence of the moonlit garden, feel the joyous solitude. Breathing in the lovely fresh night air which carried with it a hint of the ocean. There for a moment sitting on the rock, I felt free for just a moment.

Many years later, the rock is still in its place in the garden, as it was when the Kuri Aboriginal Tribe roamed free and has remained constant to this day not like the ever changing world around it. Constant forever after, maybe.