HOLDING THE HEART OF STONE There’s a character to the nature of stone that crosses the barriers of touch and the sensitive condition. I hold it, the gravity of its ancientness. As you begin — you touch it — what is the nature of that holding; the heart of the stone holds you back. Round embrace, the fingers find the ring of stone, the old bones of the earth. There is time, dropping back, in the stone. I touch the stone, smooth, cracked and distanced in the chronology of compression and its knotted and woven strata — a layering of sequences in experience. When I’m holding the stone, meditating on the concatenation of the mineral, like the painting of the earth, the sands of the heart of her. Stone calls out. TIM | THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART |