Last year I used my birthday money to buy two stones. I don’t often buy stones. I am wary of the means of their mining and the truths around their origins, and I think we are too quick to rip treasures from the ground and careless of the consequences. Nevertheless, for my birthday I indulged myself a little.
One is a large quartz crystal, chunky where the rest around it had been slender, a facet on one side close to square. It’s clear enough to see right through it, its wispy white inclusions giving the impression of ice. The other is an egg-shaped piece of labradorite. It’s dark and dense, an ancient twilight forest image trapped in the plains of blue and aquamarine, with hints of red and gold on one side. The other side is reminiscent of peering through deep water.
They are as different as night and day – one sharp and angular, one soft curves, one translucent, the other opaque, one speaks to me of high, icy mountains, of angular cliffs, of sky and stars and the clearness of desert. The other drags me deep into the mossy leaves of forests and down into the depths of secret lakes. Balanced.
Balanced between reason and logic on one hand and creative imagination on the other.
Balanced between the silence and stillness of meditation and non-action on one hand, and the rush of music, movement, words, worlding, weaving, dying, dancing, exploring and expanding on the other.
I find the two stones a comfort now – balanced – one in each hand, sitting in the space between one era and the next, watching our world shatter and shift, our doing, our too-muchness, yet according nature, the nature of the rise of one sort over another until it all falls down.
In this space, one stone in each hand, I can come to a stillness, watching with the distance of the icy peak, or watching with the awareness that out of the cauldron of chaos, new things arise.
I am in this, I am of this. My bones and blood are this planet. Earth. Her treasures in my hands.
old rough eucalypt, with stringy bark, and blood red sap, that defies identification. It hides a myriad spiders and beetles in the dark and dusty nooks and crannies of its base. It doesn’t look beautiful in the usual way. It’s liable to make people think of dark things in the night that bite, and they will probably warn their children away from it.
there is the Grandmother Tree – a lemon gum. She is huge, her bark shiny white at the right time, but currently a sort of dusky pink, as we are nearing the end of bark fall. My arms would not even go half way round her old trunk, and she stretches high and always had cockatoos,
... for our planet 