I’m holding a pebble, chosen from the small pile next to my microscope. I’ve been bringing rocks home from the beach for a few weeks now, but I don’t remember why I even picked this one up. It’s tiny (pinky-fingernail-size), light brown, smooth… nondescript. Maybe I saw a hint of detail in the bright sunlight? Who knows.
I put it under the scope. At low magnification, under the bright LEDs, the stone presents itself as a chaotic mess of details. OK now!
As I zoom in closer and closer, a wilderness reveals itself: filaments, gestures of riotous pink and red scattered through tangles of gold and amber, framed by suspended, papery membranes.
Fractured arabesques, long since healed by clear rivers and mossy pools: a whole watershed I can see down into.
I’m shipwrecked. Flabbergasted. I’ve stepped over a threshold.
“Why is no one else freaking out about this?” I ask myself. Well, rockhounds are always freaking out about rocks… but mostly about the ones that look amazing to the naked eye. This one would never make the cut. In my hand, it’s just a brown pebble. Under a loupe, it has black cracks. Under the microscope, it opens into an alien world.
I reach for the next stone in the pile. And the next. I’m fascinated by all of them. Most are merely interesting, but a few open up like the first one, and I can’t tell which is which until I look. Before the scope, that first one looked like nothing special.
A world of worlds. And it’s ours. I’m seeing inside the actual workings of this planet.
That was six years ago, in the depths of the pandemic. The house I lived in had turned into a pressure cooker. I was driving around in my van, looking for the edge of the world. I found it where the ocean meets the land. I could finally breathe again. The waves, ever-changing and unceasing for four billion years, brought me home to myself.
I drove out most days. Often I had the whole beach to myself. And the waves kept carelessly tossing fresh jewels at my feet. Their colors, their patterns, their frozen stories started calling to me. I started paying attention. The more I saw, the more I noticed. Each time I went deeper, I was rewarded with a new horizon. I looked closer and closer until I came to the edge of my abilities. And… am I really going to do it? Yes, I bought a microscope.
Boring. Broken. Chaotic. Dirty. Nothing.
We plant these words on signposts at the edges of our world, where our vision, our thought, our imagination give out. Beyond those borders, we scarcely bother to render what’s there. Revulsion stands guard like a gargoyle, warning us away.
But our attention is ours.
Where we put it, our mind flowers.
That small brown stone showed me something.
This life is strewn with thresholds that look like nothing.
For six years now, I’ve made a practice of crossing them. I spend far more time outside. Awe, beauty and wonder are there for me most days. It’s been a long conversation with the patterns of nature, and the story is still emerging.
It’s time to start sharing: one stone at a time, each with the music I hear in it and the ideas it sets ringing, and only when I think it’s worth your attention.
I’m sending these out as a beacon, so those of us who walk the edges of our world can find each other.
Small Brown Stone, LS0058. Music by Eric Oberthaler (eO)
See more images of this stone: lookingstones.com/ls0058