In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed (page 66 of Khalil Gibran, 1923, “The Prophet”).
I recently gave a small “treasure chest” of polished stones to a friend for her birthday. I filled it with 50 little stones, many of them not much larger than one of my fingernails. The stones are from the beaches of the south coast of Southland, mainly from Riverton and Gemstone Beach. Within these 50 are a wide range of the types of stones to be found on these beaches.
Walking along the beach, head down, alert for interesting stones, my eye is often caught by a flash of bright colour belonging to a small stone. At the beginning of my tumble-polishing passion, I collected a lot of such small stones but soon adjusted my eye to pay more attention to larger ones. The smaller ones get even smaller throughout the polishing process. The larger ones promise much more, can be tumbled longer, can be shaped more to remove imperfections and cracks and pits, and are more commanding with their polished presence. So, for a while, I disciplined myself NOT to pick up the smaller stones that caught my eye.
It is also the case, however, that a good mix of different sized stones in a tumble barrel is the ideal. The larger stones need smaller ones to make the process of wearing and shaping more effective. The small stones “carry” the grit or polish to the larger stones, fill up the spaces between them, and balance the load.
Furthermore, some small stones are striking in their pattern or colour or shape, and are valuable in their own right as interesting and beautiful stones. So, now, I allow myself to collect stones of many sizes and do not neglect the smaller ones.
I numbered each of the 50 stones in the birthday “treasure chest” (see photo below, left) and provided a list of the types of stones they were, if I knew.
Included were hydrogrossular stones (#8, #31 and possibly #46), stones with fossilised warm casts or traces (#17 and #49, also maybe #29), a pink rhodonite stone (#1), various quartzites (#18, #35, #38 and #45), smoky quartz (#28), a porpyry (#3), andesite (#13), banded rhyolite [now identified as ignimbrite](#22), other rhyolites (#5, #10, #12 and #23), pink granite (#26), jasper (#7, #9, #21, #30, #40 and #43), breccia (#32 and #39), quartz (#34) and argillite (#15, #20, #47 and #50).
Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things (Robert Brault).
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