diamonds and rocks
Inspired by a colleague who remarked that “some days are diamonds and some are rocks”, I don’t look at a bad day with the same weight as before. It’s just a rock day, I think now and truthfully, I’ve always loved rocks. I’m not sure when or where I started collecting them – small pebbles of interesting shape from the white sand beach we went to when I was a little girl; little gemstones that a friend in high school gave me “because rose quartz heals a heart, pain and disappointment, along with keeping and attracting love.” And the turquoise rock I picked up somewhere in my travels, the bringer of peace in the home, the protector, and also a reminder of warm ocean waters; the smooth polished piece of glass and the deep lapis lazuli all sit in an upturned shell, also in my possession for many many years on every desk in any home I’ve lived in. So rocks are around me, and they bring about pleasant thoughts, if I even bother to ponder them. Mostly they are just there, and so I’m thinking of bad days like this, as little things that can be beautiful even when at times they feel completely the opposite.
I must have always felt this way about rocks, even the unexciting ones that line a garden or make their way into your shoe on a hike. Long after I had forgotten about doing this, I came across an homage to mineral aggregates, stacked in a Welch’s grape jelly jar submerged in water. A homemade snow globe I made when I must have been six or seven. It sits on my father’s dresser. Of all the gifts I must have dolled out to him throughout my childhood – paintings, macaroni decorated picture frames, clay statues, it’s the collection of rocks in a old jam jar that he honours the most. Perhaps he saw then, what sometimes I fail to see, on those bad days, that everything passes, and those dry rocks really are beautiful when you let water wash over them.
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