On the first full day, we search for stones in the Ventura riverbed. Each of us unearths works of contemporary art – geometric wonders, inadvertent sculptures, rocks veined with intersections so perfectly haphazard that they could be purposeful. I collect more than my pockets can support. My backpack pulls at my sunburnt shoulders, laden with a makeshift museum of rocks.
My favorites are the broken surprises – the stones that appear whole, veins like scars. Lift them, and the pieces separate, some like puzzles, others like folded treasures.
What is the nature of brokenness? These stones, laced with fissures, nestled in the riverbed: are they fragile failures of stability or simply waiting in the silt and sun, welcoming the rush of river water from fresh rain, settling into the inevitable, the process of becoming?
Let me tell you the story of whole versus broken, the infinite possibilities of piecing together. Let’s weigh the gravity of words and assumptions and ask, when the rains come, and our comfort is dislodged, do our pieces form newness, do they round and weather with the tumult? Do our sharp edges blur?
Our unit of four hikes our way back to the car. The landscape is sage mottled with yellows and pale purples. Our pockets are heavy with moments.
A year has passed, and I still cannot touch our museum of stones. They sit in small bowls on shelf in my office closet, too beautiful to part with but too painful to relive. How could we have known that so much had already broken, that we sat together like those pieces of the whole but already shifting? That the river was already rushing. The water just hadn’t hit us yet.
The beauty of the past and the pain it evokes.
object of memory 