a holding stone
it’s saturday and it’s chucking it down with rain in normally sunny southampton. the planned walk and talk with friends has been postponed until early tomorrow, so the blog and music sketch posting are happening a day early this week. hey, there are no rules here. take that ‘the man’ :)
work on the track for release on 9.9 is ongoing and the title ‘a holding stone’ has emerged. as a result, there’s been a lot of reflection this week on how value is assigned to things and who decides what is valuable. in truth, that is what ‘a holding stone’ is about.
for want of a better definition, a holding stone is a small, smooth stone, picked up, and carried, which then sits in your hand and is burnished over time by absent minded turning, rubbing and fidgeting with. they may stay with you for a small part of a walk before being discarded, or be with you for years.
they can end up holding massive embedded value for the holder, soothing and calming when required - an agnostic rosary, naturally occurring worry beads - a form of small, silent, constant companion in an ever changing world if that’s what we want it to be.
yet, they are freely available, easily replaceable, abundant. if you start looking for one, you will find one soon enough. to almost everyone else, they have no particular value, but to the individual, their value can immense. They can almost feel like part of the person - an addendum to their soul. people can get very upset at the loss of them, when it happens.
we decide what to imbue with value and that has the potential to be very powerful and disruptive to the status quo.
society places so much value on things that provide so much less or even demand from us - our time, our attention, yet around us is something that can give us so much succor and support without expecting anything of us.
to be explicit - ‘a holding stone’ is a metaphor for creativity - the support it gives us, the value we should, rightly, place upon it and the power in that, whether anyone else cares or even notices.