Imagine walking outside right now, finding five rocks of varying sizes, and balancing them on top of each other to create a gorgeous stone sculpture.
This rock balancer will blow your mind — and then help you find tranquility
You probably can’t do that. But Michael Grab can.
Grab is a rock balancer. According to his webpage, he stumbled across the art in 2008 when he moved to Boulder, Colorado, to go to college. Since that time, he’s become a well-known artist throughout the area, particularly for the rock work he’s created in Boulder Creek. He’s also achieved recognition throughout the US, as well as in Sweden, Scotland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Ukraine, and Canada.
In the video above, as Grab calmly balances rocks, a voiceover of Alan Watts can be heard. Watts (1915-1973) was a British philosopher who popularized Eastern thought in the Western world. The passages come from Watts’ The Nature of Consciousness, which he delivered as a radio address on San Francisco station KSAN. For Watts, “just as the waves are continuous with the ocean,” so human beings are “one continuous process with everything else going on.”
It makes sense that Grab set his videography to Watts’ lecture, since Watts sees his rock balancing as a “fairly involved meditative practice.”
Says Grab,
Stone Balance for me is, in a sense, my Yoga, perhaps in the most literal way i can imagine. It is about dissolving the duality of my self and environment. I must BEcome the balance! There is nothing easy about it. It can frustrate me to my limits, and then I learn. Or it can reveal magic beyond words, and I learn.
Put simply, I feel something divine when I practice.
