Stepping Stones
Last summer, Colorado forgot to rain. I think we went, quite literally, from June to New Year’s Eve with only trace precipitation recorded. So this summer, peppered with scattered showers and cool, cloudy days, has felt like a gift. We’ve had heat, too, but the variety has made it bearable so far.
I’ve been sitting outside with the dogs for an hour now, first to eat my lunch and then to simply marvel at the magic that is mid-seventies temperatures and cloud cover and great sheets of rain falling from dark skies in the east. It’s been a light show of epic proportions over there, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground bolts galore, and while I’m a little sad we’re not currently caught up in the deluge, it’s also nice to be writing outside without an umbrella (or the fear of electrocution).
I shipped out an order this morning, the first in awhile. As I was packing it up, I slipped into the ease that springs from years of doing this - the packing materials leapt into my hands, the label printer spit out the shipping label and I stuck it to the box that was folded at the ready. I remember when packing an order was a trial - something that felt so effortful and like such an endeavor, all in itself. Now I’m thinking through all the things I had to learn and try and fail at to figure out how to do this and EVERY process that has been integral to my business.
But this order is likely to be one of my last, at least for awhile.
The current plan is to have a big sale at the end of July, to clean out everything I have left, and then close up the shop indefinitely. This is…more than a little terrifying, but it’s time for something different - and knowing myself, the easiest way to make the change is to simply close the old doors so I have no choice but to walk through the new. It feels simultaneously exciting and terribly, painfully sad - and I hope to tell you more about the “why” of this shift before too long. For now, I’ll just say a new day is dawning, a new path spooling itself out in front of me. And I’ll have more info on that clean-out sale soon.
But before things get too dismal, a little something I’ve been playing with!
When we got back from our trip (after a snack, but before unpacking), I pulled out the rocks I collected at Lake Superior. The last time I was there in the summertime was probably in grade school, back when I could take home as many rocks as would fit in my pockets - but that old rule was gone. I’m an adult. I filled and toted home a whole bag.
As a kid, we had a jar filled with stones from Lake Superior that sat on a shelf in our house. Though tumbled smooth by the waves of the lake, when dry they had a dusty, matte surface that made their true colors and patterns hard to see - so the jar was filled (and periodically topped up) with water to let the stones truly shine. As with the stones in that jar, all of my finds went in a cookie sheet (so I could spread them out) before adding the magic ingredient to get a better idea of what I had collected.
And then I started pulling stones to cut.
There was a time in my early life when I thought a polished stone had a coating on it, like a varnish, to let the colors shine through. A time, not much later, when I painted rocks with clear nail polish to simulate the look of water on the surface. But now I’ve got lapidary equipment and a little more knowledge of polished surfaces and I literally could not wait to get some of my finds to the wheels.
Agates tend to be the main draw for rockhounds on the beaches of Lake Superior - so we certainly looked but didn’t find too many (a drawback, I suppose, from looking on a popular beach in peak season). This little guy was our best find - so this is where I started, hoping it would reveal banding galore.
Alas, no banding…but to be the first one to see the inside of this little nugget, after millions of years in the earth and the water? Still pretty special.
After that initial agate cut, I just started working on pretty pebbles. There was the moss agate, the rutilated quartz, the Charlevoix fossil - and then countless other finds that I have yet to find a name for. As with the thread I’ve been slowly spinning, there is no plan yet for these beach treasures turned cabochons. Just the making. The hum of the polishing wheels. Seeing the patterns in the stones reveal themselves.
While I was cutting, I kept thinking about how we all dream of being an agate or a diamond or some other sparkly thing - and in so dreaming, we imagine a sparkly life where we won’t ever get food poisoning or have to clean the toilet or have a serious cry after listening to the news.
But the more stones I played with (and, arguably, I still have a few hundred others with which to test this hypothesis!) the more I found that the really rough stones, that didn’t look like much at all, often had some serious gorgeousness hiding out within. In fact, those are the stones that ended up being my favorites.
The moral of the story is that ordinary can be (and often is) extraordinary. Even with the rough bits - maybe BECAUSE of the rough bits. It’s just one more reminder from the universe that there is beauty in imperfection, value in being who and what you are in any given moment.
Stones always have the best lessons to share.
