Time And Eternity

 "Let's not talk about the election." we said to one another at the Meeting House- and having agreed we wouldn't we sort of skirted round it for a quarter of an hour before tearing ourselves away. 

So, I don't think we did too badly there.

We have put a bowl of stones on what I want to call the altar- only Quakers don't do altars- that sits at the centre of the Meeting Room. The bowl is a lovely piece of dark wood, expertly turned by Kevin, and the pebbles I gathered off the beach last Saturday. If we can have flowers on the altar table why not stones- which are as beautiful in their own way and just as grounding? I picked one out yesterday and held it through the Meeting for Worship. "Better," I said to Ailz "Than sitting there twiddling my thumbs" (a silly habit I seem to have picked up from my mother- who twiddled all the time.) I found it helped me concentrate- and had me thinking how it was an object that had existed in something like its present form for millions- perhaps billions- of years. Not that Time is anything but an illusion but even so.....

Do stones have cosnciousness? Of course they do. Everything does.