Shells and Stone [visual essay]

Tiny tableaus for a leaving day.

I’ve always been drawn to making small, sculptural tableaus from small scraps of the natural world. I’ll sit on the ground outside with a friend, composing tiny scenes from leaves and stones as I talk with friends. Indoors, I arrange and rearrange objects on our nature table (technically, “nature surface”) that lives on the dresser-top near the front door of our home.

Last spring, my daughter brought back a handful of shells and a stone from her 10-day backpacking trip near the ocean.

The past few weeks, as life’s gorgeous, unrelenting wave has been pulling our daughter from shore towards a new life at college a few states from here, I’ve been standing in the tug of that surf, standing in front of our nature table, standing in the light of the small table lamp there, arranging and re-arranging these shells and a stone from her previous time away from us here.

The images I’ve gathered, taken approximately each week over the past month, seem to me a celebration of natural form and beauty. A quiet meditation on impermanence and on the nature of connectedness and love.

Week two…

Then..

And, for this week:

Our child begins her wander from here to the newer world today.

But we belong together.

(Right?)

And just like these lines and ridges, these sequences and smooth surfaces—we, too, will return to some kind of harmony, some kind of form.

We will, won’t we?

Faith is key, for a day like today.