My secrets are safe with the stone
Last night I had my eyes closed, I was trying to find stillness but inside my head was swirling and pooling. I couldn’t quite focus or relax. After going in and out and in and out a funny image suddenly popped to the surface that was loud in such a quiet way that all the other currents of thoughts melted away. I imagined how nice it would be a collosal stone head (only for a while), I wouldn’t need a body I would just be a very very big stone head resting on the earth. The image that came to mind first was looking at the profile of the head almost as though it was through the lens of a camera, but since the view was from quite close up it couldn’t capture the whole head in its entirerty, it just revealed a section of the head. I was laughing to myself as it felt a bit silly, but imagine the pure peace of being an enormous stone head! If I was a stone head I would be both stillness and preserving stillness, I would radiate the temperature of my environment whether cool or warm. The curvature of my stone cheeks would be so nice to rest my own alive cheeks, body weight and hands on. The image in my mind reminded me of three things.
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1 - The scene in In the Mood for Love at the end where the main character confesses his secrets into the crevices of an old tree in a temple and then seals it with mud. I had actually remembered it as being the carved stone walls of a temple, and I hadn’t remembered sealing the secret with mud. When I was imagining it as a stone I was thinking how in love with the idea of an enormous wise stone keeping your secrets, a symbol of both pure stillness and acceptance. Whispering to the tree and then sealing it with mud also feels symbolic, like a way of releasing the secret from your self and returning it to the earth.
2 - This dream (link). It was surreal, lovely and silly to meet my Grandad as a granite dolphin, but to be a weatherbeaten carving of cornish granite with tufts of lovely lichen growing from you is also a sign of cycle and cycles and cycles of time and life, peace and fresh air.
3 - The scale of the head I was imagining is the same as an olmec head, with similar dimples of time across its surface. When I was very small I remember thinking that my dad’s face slightly resembled an Olmec head.