CHOOSING STONES ALONG THE PATH

One of my favorite things to do is to pick up stones that I find along the path when I walk in nature.  I’ve done this since I was a little girl, sometimes substituting seashells when the walk was by the ocean or pine cones when the walk was through a pine forest.

Today, I was noticing that I had unconsciously come up with a system of deciding which stones I would pick up to look at, and which ones would either come home with me or get tossed back to the ground. The ones that have come home with me over the year had to have at least one of the following qualities: smooth, unusual shape, familiar shape (heart, egg, rectangle, triangle), unexpected “defect”, or interesting color.

As I was standing between two small mountains on my desert walk this morning, I was reminded that, just like these mountains, each boulder, rock and small stone, was a piece of the whole of creation, and that it was only my mind and my judgments that separated one from another.  With this in mind, I began to pick up stones that I normally would not have bothered to pick up. Jagged, irregular, ordinary, dull… feeling the energy of each one. I realized that there was not much difference between the smooth, “pretty” ones that I had been choosing and any of these other stones. They each had their own unique set of characteristics, but essentially they were made of the same light and energy.

So which ones did I take home with me? I almost took home a few of the plain Jane’s just to prove to myself that I wasn’t attached to how things looked, but then I realized that as long as I am in this human body, I will always have preferences and it was okay for me to delight in the things that I found beautiful or interesting.

We have the entire Universe available to us, but we get to choose in each moment what we want to surround ourselves with and how we want to perceive those surroundings.