Yes I am a rock …..but I am more

Going through some old writing I found this that I did almost 6 years to the day.  Whew........As I read through it what struck me most was that most recently the words don't come as freely. They are stuck behind the wall of stress that I have built up and have recently begun chiseling away.  My goal is that that wall will be gone and the words will flow again.  Meanwhile I'll remind myself periodically of how it was.


July 25, 2008


As you walk along the beach you know me as a rock, a stone….one of a pile tossed by the waves or stranded on the beach. You pick me up and I am smooth and wet. Yes I am a rock …..but I am more.



I am of the body of the earth; I am of the water that is life.

When you hold me you hold time, for how you see me now is not how I have always been. I am part of the greater body broken off by the waves, moved around in the currents of life.

I have been carried by the waters that feed life and have held death and I have become one of many in the sand and the sea. My texture shows my ancestry; my veins and colors my beginning and my source; of how I was part of the body.



To know me you must understand my journey… the waves and storms that have carried me here and how I have become one with this community.

When you hold me truly look at me and feel me. I am one of many; all of different sizes, shapes and colors yet we have all been through much of the same. We are all part of the body and we have been carried by the waves; my rough edges smoothed, my sharp edges calmed by time.

When you hold me you hold time……I am the beginning and the end.

The waters that have smoothed me hold joy……. sadness…… despair….. hope…life….death. As you hold me you hold all that have touched these waters and you are connected to them all.


I am of the whale; I am of the gull; I am of the seal that feeds near the shore and of the fish that swim in the waves; I am of the child splashing in the waves; I am of the sailor lost at sea; I am of the creatures of the deep; I am the algae that feeds life; I am of them all and more.

As you hold me think of all that has touched these waters and have touched me; for you are part of us all. You too are part of the whole and like you I will someday become the sand and return fully back to the earth from where we have all come.






Jeff-in-the Berkshires (c)