Mattering
Inspired by her encounters in Cappadocia with the cradling, enduring, life-sustaining substance of rock, Susan Holliday reminds us of the importance of our relationship with matter.
‘Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”
Pierre Tielhard de Chardin[i]
Cappadocia - ancient landscape of volcanic rock in central Turkey
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Rock is the body that holds the score; the keeper of deep time; the element that most reminds us of our place as humans in a world made of aeons not soundbites; the slow-moving, solid foundation of life which both shelters us from the storm and yields to the touch of our fragile existence.
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INHABITING THE EARTH
Descending through the cloud as we land at Kayseri airport, the wide expanse of central Anatolia stretches out below as far as the eye can see. Bleached and arid, the rocky plain looks barren from this distance. After the compressed vitality and sensory feast of Istanbul, the land appears mute and empty - inhospitable, pitiless and forbidding. Stepping into the hermetically sealed vehicle which will take us further into this Cappadocian wilderness, I feel my heart contract. Why have I journeyed all this way, to a place so devoid of life?
Only now, as I write this from the comforting green of my English garden, do I begin to comprehend the extent of my ignorance and the opaqueness of my preconceptions about this ancient land of rock and sky, which has been a cradle, a sanctuary, a wellspring for life over millennia. Here, in this ‘inhospitable’ place, shaped over aeons of deep geological time, men and women have carved out an existence. They have moulded rock and the rock has moulded them.
The first peoples of Cappadocia, the Hittites, arrived and settled here sometime around 1800BC. They found shelter within the softness of sedimentary rock, carving cave dwellings and deep underground ‘cities’ into the remnant debris of ancient volcanic ash (‘tuff’). The scale of the engineering feat of these underground structures is hard to comprehend. The ancient rock ‘city’ of Elengubu burrows more than 85m below the rocky surface, encompassing 18 levels of caves and tunnels. It was in near constant use for thousands of years. New discoveries are being made all the time, revealing a massive subterranean network of smaller ‘cities’.
Cave dwelling carved into the naturally sculpted conical rock spire
The origin of the name given to this ancient realm of rock chimneys and cave cities, Cappadocia, lies in the Hittite adverb Katta, meaning ‘down below’. In contrast with the modern era, rooted as it is in enlightenment and the idea of building up from the surface, the people who populated these desert lands sustained life by going down, by burrowing in, and by making friends with the dark. Rock to them, was not lifeless, not barren or desolate, but foundational, sheltering and receptive. Rock shielded them from the baking sun and freezing cold, maintaining a constancy of temperature which sustained life. Rock provided protection from enemies and foe.
There is something profoundly humbling about standing deep in the lower levels of an underground city carved over generations into rock, breathing in the soft coolness of the air and imagining men, women and children dwelling there together in darkness, sometimes for months at a time.
These were a people who truly in-habited the earth. Digging deep down into the belly of rock, these courageous and ingenious cave dwellers engaged with the foundational basis of existence.
Matter.
Conceived within the context of elemental time and space, theirs was a life profoundly shaped by the tangible and the material. Rock allowed them to put down roots, to form sustained relationships with the intimacies of time and the locality of place. Rock tables, carved by excavating a ‘negative space’ from around a central rump of rock, created opportunities for conviviality, for the sharing of stories and the dreaming of dreams. In time rock became the first medium in which language found solid form. The earliest written words were literally hammered out into rock, in cuneiform tablets that predate Egyptian hieroglyphs and the use of papyrus. Many such tablets are now being recovered from archaeological sites all over Anatolia.
Later, these cave dwellings provided sanctuary to early Christians fleeing persecution from the forces of the Roman empire. These solitary hermits and monastic communities bequeathed us frescoed churches hewn into the rock, cave walls still dazzling over a thousand years later with the deep blue of lapis lazuli (this one at Gorem took my breath away).
Tokali Kilise Fresco (mid 9th century)
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MATTERING
Why does any of this matter? Well, ‘matter’ and ‘mattering’ is precisely the point, the nub of what I begin to understand. In an age of increasing immateriality, in which the foundational ‘stuff’ of rock, earth and flesh is increasingly denigrated to the realm of the primitive, and the virtual reality of digital experience is separated from matter and elevated, my encounter with the tangible substance and durability of rock feels revelatory and restorative.
Rock is the body that holds the score; the keeper of deep time; the element that most reminds us of our place as humans in a world made of aeons not soundbites; the slow-moving, solid foundation of life which both shelters us from the storm and yields to the touch of our fragile existence. Rock bears an imprint of the innermost thoughts of our ancestors in cuneiform script and mineral pigmentation.
Cradled in the rock dwellings of Cappadocia I begin to see how shallow the modern gaze is cast. We live in an age which seems eager to forget where we come from. In our rush to claim the future, we discount the debt we owe to those who came before us. We think we are the smartest people to have ever walked the earth, because we have given birth to AI, because we can communicate across continents at the touch of a button, because we have breached the atmosphere and travelled into outer space. We forget the seismic leaps, the ingenuity, forbearance, and creativity of our ancestors. Everything we conceive, create and communicate now stands on their shoulders. We owe these early peoples everything.
Looking back from an age in which we expect instant gratification, where we struggle to stay with the frustrations and uncertainty of our own incarnation (our slow, uneven progression through time as embodied beings), we would do well to learn the lesson of geological time. Tielhard de Chardin gets to the heart of the matter when he writes:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability —
and that it may take a very long time.[ii]
Time is the essential medium through which any creative process manifests, be this the elemental sculpting of sedimentary rock by wind and rain over aeons, or the carving of a church by human hand into rock, or the shaping of a human life. Influenced perhaps by his enduring interest in geology, Teilhard understood that the journey of psychological maturation (as individuals and as a community of beings) also takes time. We are neither in charge of this journey through time, nor are we at its mercy. In this same invocation, Tielhard offers us a beautiful descriptor of time, ‘that is to say grace and circumstances acting on your own good will’. ‘Grace’, ‘circumstance’ and ‘will’ combine over time to shape the world in which we come to dwell.
What we learn from rock, and from the enduring patience of these rock dwelling peoples, is that aspect of ‘will’ which involves persisting and sustaining. Rock is load-bearing and orientated towards gradual change. It is patient, protecting, regulating and upholding. It stores the memories of the past and conveys our present dreams and cares into the future. We inherit the maturational journey of our ancestors and we have our own ‘slow work’ to do. This work involves passing through stages of instability. It asks that we bear with an ongoing sense of incompleteness. Where we seek to skip these intermediate stages (the ‘being on the way to something’), we pass on precious little to our descendants.
Inspired by my encounters with the enduring solidities and transmitting properties of geological matter, I find myself wondering what imprint from my own life experience (if any) will stand the test of time. ‘What would I most want to endure, to transmit and pass on?’ I ask myself. ‘What truly matters to me?’ These rock-inspired musings point towards the foundational values which underpin my life. Three values stand out right now: Kindness, Beauty and Interplay. These values have shaped my personal and professional life profoundly. They are both the ‘basis’ and the ‘pathway’ of my psychotherapy practice. Without them, I fear I would be lost. I know how much these three values matter to me because of the strength of my reaction whenever I encounter their opposites: indifference, ugliness and isolation.
Like the conical rocks of Cappadocia, kindness, beauty and interplay seem to have endured the weathering of time. Whilst I sense these core values clarifying with age, I recognise that in some shape or form they have been with me from the beginning. Appreciating their faithfulness, it occurs to me that the values we hold dear act as the foundation of life, the basis of our existence, the rock from which we shape and mould a life. We are called upon both to inhabit our core values and to shape them into forms capable of cradling, sheltering and sustaining life. Perhaps this, after all, is what it means to matter.
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A CATHEDRAL OF LIFE
Alongside its properties of forming, sustaining and conveying (mattering), rock embodies one other vital property, a quality largely forsaken by our obsessively exposing and compulsively revealing culture.
Rock conceals.
Beneath its unremarkable exterior lie secret passageways, hidden hollows and invisible channels. This gift of concealment was vital to the survival of our ancestors in these (and many other) lands. What I had not appreciated is that rock conceals something infinitely precious.
Early one morning, leaving the baked heat of Uçhisar, I decide to head down a dusty winding path towards a thin ribbon of green in the valley below. Approaching the valley floor, the air becomes lighter and the acoustics soften. Bending right, the path enters a narrow tunnel of green which, to my surprise, resounds with the sound of calling birds and crickets. Slender trunks soar up towards the deep blue sky, creating a dappled path before me. A short distance along this path, I stumble upon a slow sleepy tortoise enjoying the cool of this shady oasis in a small puddle. And that’s when it dawns on me. Hidden from the merciless heat of the sun, in concealed channels beneath the rocky surface, water flows. An underground stream, invisible to the eye, nourishes the roots of trees, creating a cathedral of life.
Cathedral of life - Pigeon Valley, Cappadocia
I pause for a while and allow the freshness of this unlikely gift of grace to shower me with its greening. And that’s when it happens. This moment I will never forget.
A nightingale sings.
Here. In the rocky wilderness I thought barren, this most fragile, ephemeral, and impossibly shy bird sings in the glittering canopy above my head, sings without ceasing as though its bright heart knew no limit. I am undone. Even now as I listen to the recording I made at the time, I feel the arrow of this joyous sound fly straight to my heart. Every inch of my defended body softens, yields to the gift of this unlikely moment. And I wonder if those early peoples might have heard this same song and been touched by its grace. Perhaps they too were undone by this cleft of kairos meeting chronos.
It strikes me that this is perhaps what Tielhard de Chardin meant when he warned against rushing to ‘reach the end without delay’. The day a nightingale sang in the desert I was not impatient to reach the end of anything. I was just curious and drawn to explore an unlikely ribbon of green in the desert. I had a hunch there was more down there than met the eye.
* * *
The cradling, shape-shifting, sheltering, concealing, transmitting rocks of Cappadocia remind me where I come from. The words I am typing right now owe their conception to the cuneiform rock tablets carved at the dawn of this cradle of civilization. My bones and teeth owe their structure and strength to Calcium and Phosphorus; Magnesium supports my nerves and muscles; Sodium and Potassium regulate my blood pressure. Without these rocky minerals, invisible to the human eye, I would simply not exist.
This relationship with rock has shaped us historically, biologically and psychologically over countless generations. We are geological. Rock, it seems, is not inhospitable, pitiless or forbidding. Not barren.
Rock is life-giving.
I owe it my life
Cave dwellings near Uçhisar, Cappadocia
Words and images by Susan Holliday, July 2025
END NOTES
[i] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1 May 1881 – 10 April 1955) was a French Jesuit and priest, scientist, palaeontologist, philosopher, mystic, and teacher. Influenced as a child by his father's deep interest in natural science and geology, Teilhard studied geology, botany and zoology at the University of Paris. After the French government banned all religious orders from France and the Jesuits were exiled to the island of Jersey in the UK, Teilhard deepened his geology knowledge by studying the rocks and landscape of the island. Teilhard's life work, encapsulated in his seminal book ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ was predicated on his conviction that human spiritual development is moved by the same universal laws as material development.
[ii] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J, excerpted from Hearts on Fire, Loyola University Press US, 2005.
