Changing Stone

Stone

Something I’ve noticed. Learned perhaps. From the two stones I lift each day, just before dawn. 

One is round and smooth.

The other as long as outstretched fingers, with bands and filaments, layered and sparkling with minerals. They are Mica, quartz, and hornblende.

The large pebble is sedimentary grey, with minuscule flecks of white. It is rounded, smooth and slips easily between your fingers. Made, formed, shaped through water, knocking against other stones and the patience of eternity seas: all of this under oceans of waves and an ever changing sky.

The other is metamorphic, heated to unbelievable temperatures, then pressurised until the rock itself becomes fluid. A thick coarse mineral band of liquids, that forced into itself, of itself, melting anything and everything into existing crevasses, gaps and holes.

Burning through and amalgamating with rocks around it until, finally, it cooled slowly, slowly,  for millions of years, the minerals growing in a super rich soup, forming, shaping, coalescing, until it became the matrix of atoms, molecules, colour and form that I hold as schist in my hand.

Both weigh more than a kilogram. 

Both were here millions of years before me. 

And you. 

And after these seconds of time, of life, of me and of you, both will remain in the millions of years to come as they are now. 

For our own tides of life ebb and flow in a greater sea, filaments and grains of sand, no more.

One thing I have noticed, astonishing to me, is that I have changed both in the short years I have lifted and held them.

Where my hands and fingers have held them tight, where the sweat of exertion has seeped from the pores of my skin, the round, smooth, faceless pebble has dark patches, dark grey marks were some kind of physical exchange has occurred. 

A time of seconds has impacted upon the time of millennia. 

Life and stone. Stone and life. 

Change as unexpected, yet as real as purpose or intent.

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