Stone

Tonight I fell in love with a six pound stone. It's been around awhile. It's been around my house as a doorstop for twenty years or so. It's been under the ocean for...oh I don't know, maybe a few hundred years or more, before my commercial fisherman husband brought it home one night and told me it was probably a ballast stone from a sunken ship. I consider it a gift from him, God rest his soul, even though I picked it out of a pile of his stones, and I've kept it in my kitchen for many years, as a memento....and tonight I studied it and held it and developed an understanding that it's been used as a tool by human hands for generations. I swear it has at least a hundred years of use on it, maybe five hundred, maybe more. No one generation could wear a stone down so purposefully like this. It's been used carefully to grind something. It's worn down by thumbs and firm grips by many people. It would have been a village's favorite stone, useful for grinding corn or whatever grain needed to be ground by someone devoted to the task, like me, like I would have been in another, earlier, life, the life where maybe I used this very stone.

I once met somebody who collects these stones, he went to South America in search of them, finding and buying them from unsuspecting? proprietors in alleyway shops, where the stones were being used as...what else?...doorstops. They have a name, but I can't remember it now.

The stone is so heavy and so smooth in places, and has obviously been so well-understood since that eon when it was created by God, that I can only humbly admire it.

It weighs six pounds. It's big enough and smoothly sculpted enough that I could use it for a pillow if I had to, if I placed my ear up against it just so ,(and tonight I tried briefly, and later will try again). I wish I had had the stone in India, I could have placed my head against it and fallen asleep comforted, on many a weary night. But who can carry a stone the weight of a newborn baby, through customs, without raising eyebrows?

So what? you say. Well I am lucky to have found this stone and to have examined it thoughtfully and to have felt its life in my hands, to have felt, through it, the strength and vitality of other human hands across the millennia, as we all often could, if we awoke and opened our hearts to the past. Look at Michaelangelo, listen to Shakespeare, feel a stone that has been used by primitive people....you will see how art and endeavor can allow one human to reach hundreds or thousands of years across time, from one heart to another, and flesh comes alive, and its spirit comes trembling through.