One Thing Leads to Another

For students of ZEN, a mere stone is a treasure. When I was a child I was always fascinated with nature. I remember my mother cutting an article out of a magazine when I was about 7 yrs old, about butterfly collecting. She was an artist as well, and always curious about new things. She encouraged my curiosity and creativity early on. She made me the net with special nylon netting, a wire rim and an old broom handle. We fashioned the spreading boards from cardboard, and carefully I learned how to use a very toxic chemical which we purchased from the drugstore, to use as the method of killing the butterflies. In the beginning I was too young to realize that killing these butterflies to put into my "collection" would be so hard to do. I was too caught up in the excitement of learning about them.

For almost two summers I was totally absorbed with the process of chasing down butterflies in our neighborhood and catching them carefully in the net so as not to destroy their precious and beautiful wings. I would soak a cotton ball with a few drops of the chemical solution, and put it into a mason jar, then slip the net over the top of the jar and drop the butterfly into the jar, where she would quickly drop lifeless to the bottom. I then used metal tweezers to remove the butterfly and put her on the spreading board to display the wings, just as an Entomologist would do. I had a beautiful collection and had learned to identify all sorts of wild colorful butterflies, bugs, moths and even beetles. One day on my second summer of collecting, I was preparing another butterfly for its death chamber, and it suddenly overwhelmed me with a feeling of sadness, remorse and pain. I had an awareness that I had never felt before, of empathy and compassion for this helpless little creature that I was about to put to death. I released the butterfly immediately and vowed that I would never wilfully harm another living creature for art's sake or otherwise. I believe that incident paved the way for the philosophy I had about life from that day forward. I became a defender of animals, trees, nature, children and all sorts of ideologies. I also believe that everything we do, even seemingly painful and difficult things, eventually find a purpose in our lives and lead us to higher and higher levels. We become enlightened by the awareness of our deeds and how they can be applied to even higher purposes.

This leads me to the essence of my subject today, that being "Everything is connected".

One of the other passions of my childhood was collecting stones. Yes, simple stones from the ground. I would stop dead in my tracks to pick up and examine a little stone from the ground that had unusual colors or markings, trying to find meaning in it. Later, when my parents started to take our family on summer camping trips to Upper Michigan along Lake Superior, which is a haven for agate collectors, I would always come home with a pail full of odd but beautiful stones, much to the dismay of my Father. Some of my stone treasures from other places include fossils of early plant and animal life, and even Indian arrowhead artifacts from our back yard. Even more interesting are stones from all over the United States such as the Basalt Stones from Soldotna, Alaska or the interesting "story" stones from Sedona, Arizona. The "story" stones, have natural pictures on them that seem to speak to you. Some of these are shown here.

Basalt Stones from Alaska with Markings


Sedona Stones with "rainbow" marks


Warrior Image on Stone from Sedona

Now some would say that you can't harm a stone, because it is already dead, so I figured at my young age that picking up stones from one part of the world and taking them home to another part would do no harm to anyone, but what I learned later in life, it can be. It's like taking a baby bird from its nest. Everything has a place in nature, and it is there for a reason. Even if for us to study. But that doesn't give us the right to just take things without asking permission. So I learned about asking permission from studying Native American religions. One should always put something back in nature if you take something away. So as to create balance. Sort of like what we are supposed to do when we bring things from the store to our house....remove something else and give it away? Anyway, back to my story:

Stones have been "connected" to me most of my life, and in 1996, after I had been practicing Therapeutic Massage for several years, I learned about a new therapy called "La Stone Therapy" using heated Basalt Stones. This sounded like something I HAD to learn so I went to Tucson to study with Mary Hannagan who at the time was the only person doing this therapy. She actually developed the technique based on a dream or vision she had, and the rest is history. Mary started spreading her knowledge around and it has become one of the most therapeutic and most called for therapies known in 5 Star spas the world around.

In 1997 I was living at my daughter's house in San Diego, temporarily, while looking for a job in San Diego, and decided one day to drive up to the Stone Sculptor's Supply in Escondido, California, to see what it was all about. I had heard they sold stone and had studios for people to do stone sculpture, and even take classes. When I arrived I was mesmerized with all of the pallets filled with huge piles of white and pink marble, and even more rows and rows of Alabaster Stone, just waiting to be carved. In the back of the warehouse, were two women who ran the business at that time. Mary and Lenora. Mary talked to me about what they did and asked me "what did I want to do?" I said that I wanted to take a class in stone sculpture and when she learned that I was a massage therapist and an artist she told me that I didn't need a class. She said my instincts
and hands would guide me to do the right thing. So, she gave me a dozen or so tiny stone scraps from the pile and I purchased two little Italian rasps and off I went home to work on them on my own. She suggested that I finish them--just have fun with them--and bring them back in two weeks when I needed to polish them. She would help me.

In two weeks I had turned all of the little pieces of stone into tiny little sculptures waiting to be finished. Mary taught the elements of sanding and polishing and I was on my own then. Addicted to a new passion in art--Direct Stone Sculpting.

Eleven years later I am still sculpting stones but much larger ones now. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves stone and loves a challenging art form. It is not for the faint of heart, for stone is stone. Alabaster is much easier to work than Marble but the colors in Alabaster stone are what drew me to it. The passion of carving something so raw and unfinished into something beautiful, smooth and sensual, is very evocative. It creeps up on you until you are seeing beautiful images in every raw stone you see. I believe this is a gift that was honed by my many years of being connected to stones at an elemental way, just being aware of them, touching them, collecting them and studying their markings, has made me more in tune with the material. Working as a glass artist for ten years during the 1980's also gave me some dexterity handling tools and difficult material as well. But I believe anyone can learn it.

Raw Pink Alabaster Stone

Working successfully in Stone, I believe, takes a real determination and dedication to completion of an image in your mind's eye, and cooperation of the stone. Sculpting, like Massage and Healing work, is not something you DO to the Stone. You work in conjunction WITH the stone. Sculptor and stone work in unison, and communicate to each other just as animals communicate through our sensory nerves. Just as I sensed the beauty and pain of the butterfly so many years ago, I can "sense" the meaning in a stone. Whether it will be used as a sculpture to beautify someones home, or put in a hospital as a work of art to soothe someones soul, the beauty of the sculpture is derived from a collaboration between the stone and the artist.

Pink Alabaster Stone after Carving and Polishing