The stone
This stone, a the keeper of time, of memory, of rhythm and story.
“Explore your body through symbol, sensation, and imagination. Begin by choosing an object that represents your body. …Or you might choose something that symbolizes how you relate to your body, as a burden, a temple, a wilderness, a mystery, or a companion.”
The two-month online course through the Center for Junian Studies was about psyche and soma, entitled “Embodied Individuation.” I had signed up almost immediately and, week by week, discovered some things. This is a little of what I reflected on and wrote about for the third module, “Through the Lens of Object,” in July.
When I read the application, the image of this stone immediately came up. It’s a sea stone from Wales, which found me as I was trying to find it. It was on an inlet cove in which there were many, many others. We found each other at the end of May while I was walking part of the Wales Coast Path in Pembrokeshire.
It’s the kind of stone that fits so comfortably in the palm of my hand. It doesn’t weigh much, but it has a solid presence. It’s completely smooth and slightly cool to the touch. It’s light-medium gray with flecks of white. It is both still and moving in its own time. And now it has a permanent ink splotch because I used it in my mark-making art.
I meditated one morning while holding this Welsh stone in the palm of my hand and let feelings and images come.
This stone was one of many others in that coastal inlet, all very similar yet distinct. There’s a shared and unique history that spans both the present and the distant past. They are made of minerals and elements, geography and galaxy. Stones are keepers of time. They contain time, like our bodies, our beings, contain time, too. Old, ancient, ancestral time.
A recognition that my body, too, is a container of something old and ancient and a keeper of time. It’s not held in the mind; it’s held in the body. And not just my own individual body, but in the collective human body. Just as this stone is worn smooth by time, by wind, by water, by memory, so are we. So am I. I am smoothed and soothed by deep time.
What’s inside a stone? Deep time in memory. What’s inside my body but deep time in memory. Belonging. It’s from the sea. It washed up with the others. Unconscious revealed. It knows. It knows it belongs. Why do I forget that I do, too? But where? I don’t feel it here. I felt it in Wales.
Was it the ancestral keeper of time in my DNA that resonated, why I felt whole, and how something came alive when I was there? Even if it’s such a small percentage - 5% Welsh? But the stone is small, too, and it remembers. Even if the stone came back here with me, it knows where it originally belongs and can never be separate from that. My body too, it remembers its origins, and can never be separate from that. It belongs and is whole, even if it’s a tiny amount.
About the ink splotch on the stone. I used it in my art, dipping it in ink and making marks on paper following the rhythms of music at a Blues Festival as part of a community art project. Wales is known for its bards and poets, its lyrical language, and its folk songs. It’s like the Welsh stone became a perfect carrier for sound, music, and song that day. It knows the poetry and rhythms of people, of place and land, and meaning. Blues music is all about that! The stone is the keeper of time, of memory, imprinting sounds, and making it visible. Maybe that’s me, too.
I tried to clean off more of the ink from the stone, but it’s stayed. And now, when I see it, it looks like a coastal inlet in Wales.
Response from Tasha (Jungian practitioner and course moderator):
“Your Welsh stone speaks with such quiet, steady wisdom. I was especially touched by the moment you wrote that the stone ‘found you as you were trying to find it.’ It reminds me of Rumi’s words: ‘What you are seeking is also seeking you.’ When we search for something meaningful, whether a place, a sense of belonging, or even a part of ourselves, that very thing is also moving toward us in some way. Your encounter with the stone feels like that. It wasn’t just a random object you picked up, it felt like a response, as if the land was meeting you in your longing, offering something back. That’s what makes this moment feel so powerful, your body recognized something in that place, and perhaps that place was recognizing something in you. Like the stone, your body has been shaped by tides unseen: ancestral threads, elemental forces, the music of place and memory moving across time. The connection you draw between the stone’s smoothness and your own embodied journey through deep time is deeply moving. There’s something quietly powerful in the recognition that the body holds memory, not only your own, but something older, collective, rhythmic. The kind of memory that doesn’t need to be recalled, because it’s already imprinted in bone, breath, and heartbeat. And then there’s the ink. What might be seen as a stain becomes, in your telling, a mark of presence, of art-making, of rhythm, of participation. It’s as if the stone and by extension, your body has become a vessel for both poetry and place, a keeper of rhythm and story. A body that remembers its belonging even when the mind forgets.”
