If I am to be a rock.
Shall I be a rock, fashioned to a shape just so? To take my place and make my home in the pedestal or column of the façade of some mighty building. I will bear the weight of others, that they in turn might rise ethereally into the clouds.
Might I be found as part of a great wall or fortification? Protecting those innocent souls on one side from the ravening hordes upon the other, who would do them harm.
I might contain a hidden diamond? Or other precious stones, or gold or silver, which, when cut out and polished, would take their places in the heart of some beautiful necklace or ornament. To be admired through the ages.
Shall I be an great outcrop? Hard and impervious to the passing of time, standing proud upon a plain for all to see? That I might show the endlessness of my nature against the short lives of the quicker creatures who come to pay homage.
Shall I be placed in a great ring upon the earth by the ancient peoples to predict the movements in the sky?
Shall I be buried deep in the earth? Pressed down and heated to change my very being, edging across the world as part of a majestic tectonic plate. Shall I?
I may become a host of pebbles upon a beach. Whooshed back and forth by the endless waves, waiting to receive the prow of a craft, laden with intrepid adventurers.
I, rock, shall be the hardest, grittiest, smoothest, heaviest, most beautifully carved rock ever. I shall be the rockiest of rocks that ever rocked.
Just then, as the creature mused, the breeze dropped and the surface of the water, wherein he had espied eself, grew clear as a mirror for a short time. And there, looking back at him with dark eyes, was a human’s face, not a rock at all.
But I feel like a rock, I am heavy, so heavy that I cannot move. I have no feet, I rest upon the ground, rocks lie below me deep into the centre of the earth. The wind and rain play over my surface but I do not change, only the freezing of ice in tiny cracks in my surface can grind me down.
Well, said the Sphinx as the Blue Knight’s tale drifted to a close, We all feel a bit like that from time to time.
The Guardians of the Cave 