QC Rocks Really Rocks
Someday, perhaps someday soon, you may be walking along a path in a local park, or near a museum, or an outdoor restaurant.
You may be having a bad day. You may be needing something, anything, to bring a smile to your face.
And while your head is down, you may find something to bring your spirits up.
A rock.
A brightly painted, festive work of art, a totally random treasure, left behind, that fate deemed for you to discover.
And when you pick it up, a smile on your face as you enjoy the festive colors and shapes, you’ll find a message, a positive wink, sent across time, from a local group called QC Rocks.
QC Rocks, the brainchild of Bettendorf resident Wendy Reyes, 48, is based on a very simple concept. Reyes, her friends, and various random people who join up on the movement’s facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/
“We just put them out there in different places for people to find at random, that’s it,” Reyes says, happily. “It’s just this simple concept, but it means so much sometimes. People could be having a bad day or be depressed or whatever and you might be outside taking a walk and all the sudden you find this little treasure and it brightens your day. There’s something so simple but so beautiful about it.”
And that simple beauty has struck a chord.
Within a week of Reyes starting her page, and beginning to hide rocks in mid-June, her facebook page had gathered almost 800 followers. They’re now above 1,000 and climbing. And all for people to check out the rocks she and others have painted, the stories of how people have found them, and what those small gestures have meant, tiny ripples created by rocks thrown across the transit of time.
“I think it’s gotten so popular so fast because people are really hungering for something positive right now,” Reyes says. “We’re living in such a negative time, there are so many negative things going on, day after day, and people are burned out. They need something positive, however small, so when they find these rocks, just little painted rocks with positive affirmations on them, it means something.”
The inclusiveness is likewise a lure, she says. Anyone can paint and leave the rocks anywhere. She only asks that they include the website on the back of the rock and that all of the messages painted on the rocks (if indeed a message is included) are positive and life-affirming.
“We want people to pick them up and smile,” she said.
Reyes got the idea from similar movements in other parts of the country, most notably Palm Beach, Florida, where a friend of hers resides.
“She told me about it and I started following their page,” Reyes said. “And one night I said, you know what, we need something positive like that around here, so I started it.”
Since then it’s exploded, with people joining the page and posting about where they found the rocks, what it meant to them to find them, and posting pictures of them. They then pay it forward by hiding the rocks elsewhere, or they keep the rocks they found and create their own to plant in other locations for others to find. Warm feelings skipping along on the backs of rocks, rippling across the pond of humanity.
“It’s become a great activity for families and friends to do, people get together and paint rocks together and then go and hide them at different places, we’ve got a lot of families, parents who paint rocks with their kids and then hide them and wait for them to be found,” Reyes found. “It’s a great bonding activity for families and something that people can do to have a positive impact on the community. You know, anything that makes someone’s day better, however small, is a good thing.
“I love it,” she adds, “It just makes me feel really good to make people happy. It’s such a small, simple thing, but that’s one of the charms of it. You don’t really need a lot of money or big things to make you happy. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that are the best.”
For more information on the group and to follow along, check out https://www.facebook.com/
To join the movement, just grab your own rocks, get some paint, and send out your own pebbles, rippling across the ocean of humanity in our cities.
