Thinking like a stone

Obviously, I can't really do this either. But I might be better at it than I am at thinking like a pigeon. Essentially because one can spend more time with stones. Lean against them. Touch them. Inspect them closely.

When I visited Avebury last year, I felt as though I were being sucked into the stone. The one that minds the inner circle and has a shape like a seat. And prior to that, at Scorhill Stone Circle, I had a conversation with a stone, who told me that we humans can't know the pain of being melted in the core of the earth and shat out as magma. Quite right.

So, in my recent tour, with Saskia, I wanted to explore stones as well as trees. We started at Avebury.

We sat for a while with this stone. I felt it say something, which, I think, Saskia wrote down. She felt something from it too.

One thing I noticed is that my sense of "the right way" to commun(icat)e with non-humans has changed and is now different from that of others. I don't feel the need to "ask" permission.... I feel that the permission is there (or I would not approach) and instead I run up rather like a small child who grasps you round the knees, knocking its solid little body firmly into yours and making you laugh out loud, with the pleasure of being embraced (seen) by this junior but also precious other. I feel with the stones and the trees that I am that child rushing, without ceremony, into encounter. That the self that I am in those moments has an innocence or a purity that simply experiences connection as always and already there.

We also visited the stone with the seat and I, again, felt myself sinking in.... into a dissolution rather than a communion. And that dissolution is not to be feared.

On Dartmoor, we found the circle on the front page near Down Tor, and it is the start (or end?) of a row of stones, an avenue. We named it "The Circle of Immanence". The feeling was that the circle is a reminder of the always preciousness of all the earth. There is nothing special about the space inside the circle, rather it simply acknowledges that every place is in fact EVERYTHING.