The place where beauty comes from

In June I started writing Morning Pages as I embarked on ‘a spiritual path to higher creativity’ with the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (recommended by my ceramics friend and inspiring artist, woman and mother Ditte Blohm). Every morning, religiously, I would wake up and sit to write three pages where I would dump whatever there was in my brain. From shitty poems about how tired I was, how great I had slept or how happy I was about flying to Spain; to digressions on my life, making and a newly discovered (and harmless) lump on my breast and the possibility of having breast cancer. In a nutshell, an open bar of blah.

Since I came to Spain to first work from - my real - home and then be on holidays, I have written a total of… one morning. No more, no less. Today, though, day 26 of my stay, I felt the urge to write, as there was a question I wanted to find an answer to.

I have been collecting stones from beaches since last summer. Unable to fly to Spain, I spent a lot of time on the English shores - Cornwall, Sussex and Dorset. I started collecting stones because I realised that their colours differed considerably depending on the location. Green in Cornwall, white chalk in Sussex and red and black in Dorset (if I remember well…!). This summer, I collected some more in Spain as a friend/chosen sister suggested it as a way to feed my creative juices. Just as Georgia O’keeffe did.

After a year engaging with and observing pebbles, this urging question I have is - why do stones look a thousand times more beautiful, shiny and unique while in the water? Why once they are out they seem to - or actually do - have lost their magic? All pale. Flat coloured. Lifeless.

Does this happen to us, humans, too?

Do we lose some of our essence and beauty once removed from our original environment? Am I more me when I am at home, in Spain, where I speak my mother tongue, with my blood family? Do I lose the power to shine while under another sky, another light - in different waters?

But what is those stones’ original environment? Where are they ‘really’ from? The seabed or a mountain long dead?

Is the water the filter they needed to truly be themselves? To finally shine?

Does this happen to us, humans, too?

Do we need a seismic movement, a landslide or a dramatic landscape change to unravel our ‘real’ identity? Do we need to be removed from, deprived of, the comfort of our origins to discover the beauty we hide? Am I then my true self in London where I have gone through personal, professional and spiritual changes, experiences and an earthfall of the self I once only knew that have brought to the surface all my beauty - all my potential?

Those stones I have been collecting in the last year are smooth, flat (generally) and with curved edges. Kidney stones, Lucy has been calling them this summer. The water, erosion and time has been transforming what once was surface and all that there was to see, to now bring to shore those beauties I have found.

I don’t know where those stones come from and I don’t need to know it to define them. What I find beautiful is that it has been time and the contact with the elements and other beings - wind, water, sand and other fellow stones - that has made them what they are today, brought them where they are today.