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One Pebble at a Time

One Pebble at a Time
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One Pebble at a Time: Making Mosaic Stepping Stones in 2005

When I started making mosaics, I felt an intrusive guilt that I wasn’t making collages anymore.  Collage was my first step into art, my first furtive kindness to myself in allowing myself to make art.  When I started making collages, I felt anxiety because I believed I should be writing poems instead.  I had been a poet since I was 12.  I was good at writing poems.  I won awards; I had poems in magazines; I was a Poet and had no room for any other self.

There is a fierceness in kindness, protecting the unfurling heart.

The stepping stones were practical.  Stratoz and I had bought a rowhouse with a long narrow backyard, and I decided to make pebble mosaic stepping stones for our garden.  A stepping stone allows a firm footing for walking  through mud, and can define a space, guide a path.

As a child, stepping stones were magical, jumping from one to the next, each a self-contained world.  Stepping stones are human scale.  I had an anxious mind demanding superhuman scale, a speedway, a leap through time, tessering.  When I took a small step, there were large repercussions in my fearfulness: what if I am choosing the wrong thing?  What if I am meant to write poetry and I displease God, and vanish from the earth?  What if I am moving too slowly?  Or too fast?

I had given myself a year to explore different mediums of artmaking, and it took all my grit to continue exploring.  When mosaics spoke to my heart, I felt both joy and fear, because to enjoy making mosaics stirred up the the thoughts of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the fear of never ridding myself of the fear.  That I continued on, one pebble at a time, is grace.

There is a fierceness in kindness, protecting the unfurling heart.

 

What kindness will you give yourself?

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