A True Story About Stones

A few years ago I wrote a poem. The poem was about a few years earlier than that, about a time in my life when I was very young and I felt very close to death. In the poem, I wrote about being deep in a well. A cold, dark, deep and abandoned well. In that well, I wallowed around and I felt very confused and full of painful suffering. But one day, at the bottom of the well I found a stone. It was a smooth stone that fit nicely in my palm. In the poem, I wrote about how that stone brought me back to life. But after I wrote the poem and read it, I didn’t really understand what I meant about the stone. I wasn’t sure what I meant about stones and life, and where the stone idea even came from.

And then I forgot about the poem for a few years. But then, in 2021, my partner and I quit our jobs and went to Finland for six months. We spent the whole time embracing nature and enjoying a tremendous amount of time away from money. We had more space than we’d ever had in our lives. So, naturally things became more spiritual and I was much more capable of exploring the mystical. About halfway through our time, at the very start of our artist residency, I finally successfully painted a rock. I was absolutely overjoyed, because I’d been wanting to properly capture a rock for a while. So then I just started painting a shit load of rocks and stones all over the place. 

Then I thought, “Alright what is it with me and rocks?!” And then I realized that a rock can save your life. When you hold a stone in your hand, it often feels heavier than it looks. It feels warm, and it feels strangely comforting. Since the dawn of time, people have used rocks, stones, and crystals for guidance. This is because a stone has seen much more than you, your parents, your parents’ parents, and so forth. All the gravel, all the pebbles, all the rocks and stones that we pass by in our cars or on our bikes or under our feet, all of those rocks and stones have seen more of this Earth than we could ever imagine. These boulders have been around since the Ice Age. They do not give a shit about your annual revenue. 

The point is, a stone can allow you to travel through time. Or at the very least, a stone can remind you of the nature of time. It can remind you of the relevance of deep past, present, and future, in that all of those eras exist in your life, in this moment. And in a more straight-forward way, a stone is full of joy because it is so incredibly mundane. One long look at a stone will remind you of the eons of beauty, complexity, and awe that reside in the things that are all around us.