The Lee of the Stone
The potential of neglected things
In the children’s movie The Secret of Nimh a mouse and her family are in danger of losing their home. They live in a cinder block in the middle of a field that is going to be tilled soon. The family must move their home to the “lee of the stone” with the help of some rats who live under a rose bush. The lee is the area that the farmer neglects to till when he drives around the stone. It is in the shade of the stone and the darkness under the rose bush where what is neglected and rejected is left to become what it will.
In the field, what lives in the flat open spaces gets cut down, low and even. What is unwanted is thrown to the edges or chased underground while the farmer and his stable crop live in the light on flat and even earth. But at the edges - the stony, thorny, uneven places - where the farmer and his tiller fear to reach, the untilled patches continue to grow to their unkempt potential; untended, unattended, unintended. Flowers, trees, fruits and weeds can grow in it; birds, bees, skunks and snakes can live in it.
It is those that grow in the untilled patches who mingle with the wilderness and do seedy commerce amongst foreign flowers; it is those whose seeds drift into the village to grow in the cracks of sober buildings and at the edges of conscientious lawns; it is those that grow in the lee of the stone, who endure at the uneven edges, who toil in thorny darkness, who, having less, do more; and take what life they can with the sun and rain they are given and with whatever was set in their original seed.