First day doing dry stack masonry since 2010, for a wage anyway. Felt like putting on an old glove, not that I actually wore any. The joints in my left hand remembered well the beatings they have absorbed from misplaced hammer blows. The rest of my frame aches with the familiarity of bringing these oddly shaped weights up from the earth to rest in their place along the wall. I did give it up because of how brutal it is on a body, although the pace of work suits me just fine, and getting behind a hammer and chisel brings to mind the many millennia of people who have engaged in the trade all over the planet. Appreciating the effort of bringing any two stones together at a tightly approximated joint, one is imbued with the further awe of the embodied energy of the monumental works in human history. What things are worth preserving beyond a human lifetime, beyond our own civilization, so much so that you would carve them into stone, and raise arches beyond the height of any man?