January Project Day 13

Overcast sky

reflected into 

a steel grey river

that snakes 

along the boundaries

A couple years ago, I was involved in a conscious writing project called a River of Stones that required me to make one focused observation, one small stone, and write about it.  I fell in love with this practice of writing.  When I feel stuck as shit, I find that if I close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths, when I open my eyes I see things from a different prospective - a plate on edge rather than en face.  And that from this place even common things become more beautiful to me.  If I can squeak out one small stone, it's often enough to break the bottleneck of words and the flow was restored.  Perhaps it's the size.  Things that are small in our culture have little value.  That is our intellectual undoing.  Nature shows us over and over how a big thing can be felled by something small.  For instance:

The smallest vertebra is the atlas.  Ironically it is the one with the largest range of motion and the very critical job of supporting our oversize noggins.    

The human population of the world can be undone by a critter you can't even see.  The Spanish Flu, the Plague, AIDS, Ebola.  Undone by something we STILL can't figure out how to beat.  

Depending on your leanings, that a poor Jewish carpenter would change the world, or a holy man under a bodhi tree, or a failed young Bavarian painter.  

No.  It is the smallest of things that undoes us.  
A small stone is so much bigger than it appears