To Be A Stone
Sensing the lithic within.
Part of Lithic Attunement Exercises
- Psychogeological drift
- Written in stone
- I’m not afraid of the dark
- To be a stone
- A pebble in my pocket
- Correspondence
| Duration: 30 minutes for each exercise |
| Location: Outdoors in “nature” |
You are somewhere outdoors. Look around you, and find a place with stones. Sit down and look. Observe a stone that catches your eye. Pick it up in your hand. Wrap the stone into your hand. Smell, taste, touch.
Remember. Put the stone in your pocket; it will accompany you home today.
Close your eyes.
stone rests for millions of aeons
breathe once every thousand years
shaped by the elements
the body’s smallest units are now stone particles
heavy, heavier, heavy
compressed, the body is filled with air between these
particles.
Su-En
Exercise 1: Be a stone rolling around in the quarry
My stone has all its senses. It has eyes and can see neighbour shrubs and stones. My stone has smell, and it can sense the wonderful scents that come from the soil. It smells like liquorice candy. I want to be a small stone that rolls. I land with my face in the earth. This is what I imagine — I am a stone that wants to land in the smell of liquorice.
My practice is an in-between space, between reality and imagination. I construct my ecological narrative. I take the role of the stone on a journey for the liquorice smell. I think about the structure of the stone. What material and structural properties does my stone have? This added layer of knowing helps me to construct my performance. I begin to move.
I encounter the corpse of a dead bee. I find holes in the earth. Are they homes for other insects?
The exercise is to be a stone amongst other stones in the sun, rolling around in a quarry. You can choose to be a small pebble or a larger stone. The size you choose to be will determine the scale, speed, and distance you travel. But also, the sound the stone makes. Remember that the stone comes to know its surroundings differently than the human can.
I must let my senses wander as my thought,
my eyes see without looking...
Go not to the object; let it come to you.
Henry Thoreau
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Exercise 2: Be the space in-between
In this second exercise, choose to be that which fills up a space between the stones — the soil, shrubs, moss, weeds, pockets of air, or the space between subatomic particles.
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