Walked to the beach on the spur of the moment in the winter afternoon sun. Walked, talked and then sat on the rocks.
We watched a cormorant dipping for fish. It was silently slipping between waves, reappearing in new places every time. Such clever birds. Half bird, half fish. Alive, very much alive and living in the moment. It’s sleek black body glinted in the sun.
The seawater sparkled and the air felt so good. Vitamin air for the soul. So clean and pure, it makes you breathe in deeper. Sea air breathed a smile into my skin, soothing a frown. I repeatedly forget its magic even when I live nearby. How mad is that.
We sat and started throwing pebbles to hit a pebble in the sand which of course I missed, but made us smile all the same. And then we thought, naively, that we might try and trick the cormorant, thinking it might be drawn to the sound of pebbles dropping into the water, looking for fish. But not to be fooled. It fished away in the opposite way, unintrigued, perhaps oblivious to our games anyway.
Then I found a ball of a pebble almost perfectly, insanely round. I couldn’t throw it. It was too perfect to throw and lose. A stone sphere. It balanced in the outstretched palm of my hand. If it rolled around, it always returned to the soft dip of my hand. It looked like a magnet. I suppose it was not so perfectly round, but you couldn’t see that on the ground. The sun gave it form, like a moon. The half nearest the sea was soft grey and the other was in shadow in a purply haze. It felt beautifully smooth and heavy and true. I put it in my pocket and I brought it home. It sits on my bookshelf as if it belongs. It reminds me of that afternoon and the cormorant and the vitamin air. It’s my moon stone.
Silly to collect a pebble says my head, but my heart is happy I did. The heart finds beauty where the maths makes no sense at all.
🤍
These tiny flower lanterns grow just above the pebbles and were lightly dusted with frost at the break of that day.
Lots of love,
