Now you can build a digital cairn free from cultural appropriation and/or hauntings
Everybody stop what you're doing and go stack some damn rocks
You know what’s cool? A big ol’ pile of rocks.
No, we’re being absolutely serious here: Small, precariously perched stones arranged to form larger monuments can be found pretty much wherever human beings have ended up over the last few thousand years, making them kind of simple, transcendent markers of place and time.
Still unconvinced? Well, this National Geographic essay on “cairns”—as these rock piles are badass-ly called—makes a better case than we can:
The desire to stack rocks is understandable from a practical, aesthetic, and spiritual perspective. It seems almost primal. “As a species, we evolved in rocky landscapes,” says David B. Williams, who wrote the book Cairns: Messengers in Stone. “We have been building these things for thousands of years. They’re a way to say: I am here. I have lived.”