You are free to believe that these are ordinary stones. Mere pebbles. But we – the stones & I – we know different.
Each of these is individually special.
As a collection they are jointly special.
Each of these stones has travelled many miles and seen many sunrises and many sunsets and endured many storms. They have been tumbled for countless years in the sand and the salt and the water. Each of these stones has a story to tell. Its own story. If you sit quiet within the sound of the sea, when there is no-one else around, maybe one of them, maybe each of them, will tell you their story.
And maybe they will not….or not in a way that you can hear it.
Hold them anyway. Keep them safe. Because stones have long and slow lives, and what might feel like they're ignoring your entreaty to converse might be, to them, a fraction of a heartbeat.
Pebbles are slow in their birthing.
Pebbles speak first of patience.
When you hold them as individuals, feel their smoothness and reflect on how they came by it. We are not smoothed and polished by a life of ease. Look at their colours, their lines, their shades and wonder of what material they are made, and reflect on this: we are multi-faceted, from multi-composites, we are mottled and many-coloured and herein lies some of our beauty.
Hold these stones, one by one. Look closely. And listen. I cannot tell you what you will see, or what they will say.
I know only what they said to me, which, unspoken in words, is how they cleaved together as a group and how I brought them here. To me they called out, simply that. They were all found within a two-hand-span of each other, in the wet sand, between a swim and a return to the world.
Mine. And theirs.
They had swum in the ocean and wanted now to return (for a while) to the world. They were still wet, and they like to be wet, so if you put them upon an altar mist them, or lay them in shallow water, refreshed at least as frequently as the ebb and flow of the tide. They shine and laugh when they are wet. It is harder to breathe when dry.
Listen for the language beyond words. Stones live long and speak slowly. Feel their story.
There are many things that they know that I do not. The one thing we both know – the stones and I – is that they were collected on a day full of sunshine and of love. Love for family. Love for friends. Love that is hard because it is the only thing left holding you to someone with whom you once had much more in common. Love is the last thing to leave.
The stones were warm with the heat of the sun and the heat of the earth and the warmth of the water that washes the one into the other.
Stones like to be warmed. And they like to be held. Put any child on a beach and count the seconds until they pick up a pebble. Do the same with an adult. We are called into contact.
And stones have infinite capacity to absorb and resonate the frequency of love.
It is in that knowledge and my wider lack-of-knowing that I give you these seven stones. I ask you to hold them, individually, and as a group. If you are moved to let them go, let them go together. And add your own thoughts and stone-words as you send them on their way, however few those words may be. Don't let these few be unloved, for they are precious stones.
Ah.
Perhaps you have not yet realised.
A precious stone is not one of a certain chemical make-up or crystalline alignment or translucent colour such that mankind has deemed it valuable in monetary terms. No. Precious stones are the ones we pick up because we hear them asking to be held. The ones we pick up on a happy day.
Like the white one I found on a beach in south Wales. Or the geometric crystal from a plateau in Mexico, or the fossil from a Nepalese river bed, or the simple striped pebble from the rose red city. Or the smiling one from my local beach. Or the one you brought back from a Kent sunset.
The precious stones are the ones who let us become part of their story. And who knows, maybe one day they will share our part in their story with someone else.
So I give you these – these precious stones – and I tell you that on one afternoon In September, I walked that stretch of beach that we both know, and the sun was shining, and I was salt-washed and happy-tired, and they spoke to me…and made me think of you.
