VALENTINES AND STONES

Flowers come to mind when most of us think of Valentine’s Day, but today I will consider, instead, the magnificence of stones. Flowers are soft and pleasing and stand for things shared and cherished by friends, but stones are striking, too, especially in the way they stay silently in the center of wherever the universe places them. Stones are satisfied, it seems – pleased to unobtrusively persist just where they are. On this day when friendship and kindheartedness are acclaimed, isn’t it important to pay attention to the parts of our lives that let things happen the way they’re supposed to happen, like the stones that sit where they are as rain and winds and sunshine pass across them? Love, most of all, is about allowing the loveliness of all things to talk to us, to tell us the story of the abundance and beauty of our lives. Love, for me, is far more than magical moments between two people. It’s the summer grass giving us its best greenness, and the tires on cars carrying people with perfect ease, and trees twisting with style in breezes, and stones in ditches doing their best to be simply stones. A stone is a handsome something as it sits beside the street on my way to school, handsome because it’s modest and unassuming in this world where most of us slave away to be noticed and praised. I say my greetings today to stones, those simple things that know how to sit and stay in this unceasingly unsatisfied and rushing world.