I no longer do guest posts.
Or at least, I haven’t done a guest post in more than 6 months and I do not feel inclined to do one anytime soon.
The guest posts I have done are lately feeling like orphaned bits of me, and I would like to bring them home.
Starting with this one, which first appeared over on Tracie’s blog From Tracie back in February of this year.
Stone’s Refusal
I was reading a poem the other day and thought to myself, “Oh, I remember that song.”
I held my hand in the air before me to imagine the missing stone. Cupped my hand to hold the stone that wasn’t there. Felt its imaginary heft against my palm.
Remembered.
A walk along a black sand beach. The sand turns to stones beneath my feet. A million smoothened rounded stones of goose-egg size. As the water surges and then recedes, there is the most amazing and beautiful sound.
The sound of a million whispers. Musical and floating in the air . . . a million whispered greetings and farewells as the water caresses and pulses over the stones. The stones speak as individuals and as a group, the depths and highs of their voices joining as one in a chorus of sibilant shushing secret truth.
I am entranced.
I listen to the whispers. I close my eyes as the waves spill against my feet. I close my eyes and listen as the stones upon which I stand tell their story. I try to hold the sound within my mind. I want to have this sound. I want to own these whispers.
These are the whispers of forever. These are the whispers of a promised forever tempered by the acceptance of impermanence. These are the whispers of the universe.
That these words have been spoken a million times without my awareness . . . I am heartbroken that I have missed all that has come before.
I want to hear this song for the rest of whatever portion of forever I am granted.
I want to hear this song.
I bend to pick up a single stone, and as I do, the song of this particular stone is silenced.
It is an oblong stone. Dark and gray. A stone pitted and ravaged and left with small cavernous bits of emptiness.
A stone forged by fire.
Molten lava flowed and gas was trapped within. The gas escaped as the lava cooled, forming holes and cavities in the young stone’s surface. Those holes make the stone weaker than it might otherwise be. Those holes make the stone vulnerable to the flow of the outside world.
But those holes allow the stone to sing.
I bend to replace the stone. It joins in the chorus. The water flows over the stones and into every hole and crevice and empty space. It presses its heavy silver self into the stones. The stones accept the water . . . welcome it in . . . sing of the welcoming as empty is filled.
Only so far and then there is refusal. A sighing whispered claiming of identity.
Only this far and no farther.
I am stone.
The water drains away and the stones sing gorgeously of the refusal even as they gather breath to allow their empty spaces to be filled again.
I listen to the repeated exquisite song of acceptance and refusal.
Of weakness and then strength.
Of weakness that brings gifts.
I brush tears from my eyes.
I did not know such a song existed.
A song for me.
I want to sing this song.
I am stone.
Forged by fire.
Filled with small holes and imperfections that exploded within me when I was young.
My imperfections and empty spaces make me weaker than I might otherwise be.
I am more vulnerable to the press of the outside world than I might wish to be.
But my empty spaces and vulnerabilities allow me to sing.
A whispered song.
Life presses into me. Presses its heavy silver self into my spaces. Fills me up.
I accept and sing the song of that acceptance.
But this far and no farther.
There is refusal.
And I sing that song as well.
I am stone.
I whisper.
I sing.
I refuse.
Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone’s
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.
What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s
Refusal of the river, not the river.
– What any lover learns, by Archibald MacLeish
