A Space-Time Portal for Stones

The portal

There are those among us with a love of stones, rocks and pebbles. We pick them up, put them in our pocket and take them home. There is no objective rhyme or reason for our selections, this obsession is highly subjective. We simply love stones and need to collect the ones that capture our fancy.

Part of my personal stone collection

For my initial theories on collecting rocks and the virtue of helping the stones move around the planet, see an earlier post, For the Love of Stones.

Now I have stumbled upon an even more effective and artful method for transporting rocks and giving them an extaordiary, once-in-a-millenium experience: a space-time portal for stones. The portal is a hollow  papiér-mâche bird, crafted from the pages of one of my old travel notebooks and scraps of gold joss paper.

The portal when closed

A small door on the chest of the bird features a small gold-bead handle. To operate the portal, open the door, place a stone inside, and let it rest inside the portal until it is ready for transit. The next time you go for a walk (preferably a meandering, pointless walk), remove the stone from the portal, take it with you, and leave it somewhere along your way. Select another rock from the landscape, employing the critical aesthetic judgement that makes sense only to you, and return home. Place the new rock in the portal to await its transit adventure.

The portal in operation

This may seem like a trivial, meaningless activity, but consider the implications. For the stone, which may remain in the same place with very little happening for centuries, this is a universe-changing, mind-blowing experience. Its reality has utterly changed. At the same time, though your part in this process may seem minor and irrelevant, you are in fact in the process of incrementally terraforming the planet.

While there are no plans at this end to start manufacturing space-time portals you are, as always, encouraged to create one of your own. Your stones will thank you for it.