Every once and a while I find a story that has significant evocative powers–abilities to draw from us (me) a sense of that inner spark we seek to manifest.  When I find them I will publish them here so you can read them as well.  This one is from Jordan Stratdord’s+ Blog.

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A Jordan Stratford Story, from his Blog

 

Once upon a time a young girl was walking along an African beach. She saw a small, smooth, black stone, and put it in the pocket of her dress. She liked the way it rubbed against her thumb, and she wondered how the stone got to be on the beach, whether it had washed ashore from distant lands, or belonged to a great black mountain that had worn away on that very spot. She imagined great trees and wild animals alive on that mountain – she swore the stone remembered the perfume of those trees and the night-cries of the animals. The stone nestled in her tightly closed palm, both secure in the pocket of her dress, as she walked home, and days later to the park, and years later to school, and years later still on an eventful train traveling through South Africa.

The young Indian man on the train was a law student, well dressed, and there was an air of confident calm about him. The girl, now a young woman, felt a kind of love for the man that wasn’t romantic, but she was compelled to… to what? Kiss him? Speak to him? No. From her pocket she pulled her thumbworn stone, centered it in her open palm, and presented it to the young man, who’s warm brown eyes locked hers and smiled in silent understanding.

The lawyer would one day be known as Mahatma Gandhi. Legend has it he offered the stone to a salt merchant in India, who in turn gave it to his son, a hand on a container ship. In Marseilles, the sailor’s eyes met that of an elderly baker; again the stone was passed on, and again, to reside in the top desk drawer of an eccentric Swiss patent clerk. The clerk would weigh the stone absently while he dreamt of the nature of time, and of light.

Albert Einstein gave the stone to his housekeeper – unsure of what compelled him to do so – and she in turn gave the stone to her niece, who was distraught at the death of her infant child. This is how the stone came to rest on a windowsill cluttered with bird skulls, chinese coins, and small bronzes of Hindu gods. The window looked out a lake, and the lake looked back into the office of Carl Jung, who mailed the stone to an antiquities dealer in Ostende, who presented it to his younger brother, visiting from New York. And on and on, the stone at once reflecting and absorbing the light around it, the narrative arcs and imperfections of the lives it touched.

I will tell you this; the stone is here in my breast pocket right now, next to my heart. It reminds me that the story is larger than my life, that it has been the companion of great men and women, and little men and women, and angry and flawed men and women. The stone is older than what I want or who I am. It ennobles me and it humbles me. And one day the stone will leave my pocket and I will die.

Now I will tell you this: there is no stone.

Rather, there is a laying on of hands and a blessing in a language once rich with life and now reserved only for such blessings, and the arcane magics of medicine and law. All the same, there was someone who touched someone who touched someone famous, and that famous someone touched someone who was a scoundrel, and the scoundrel touched someone who saw the blessing for what it was and not the mere tricksterism of a fool, so he touched someone and so on down through the centuries. And then there was my blessing, the hands on my head and the smell of dust and incense, and the ancient words spoken. And those words here, next to my heart, larger and older than anything I can possibly be alone.

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“The Stone that Was NOT There, eh”  says Parzifal