Pebbles and Words

It is summer – at least in one half of the world. Depending on one’s origin and residence, summer means as many different things as people around the world. Born and having eventually settled down in a place in Greece where the sea is only a stone’s throw from home, summer to me means pebbly beaches and boundless seas.

In the long hours of sea-gazing one cannot help becoming rather philosophical if, for no other reason, in order to while the time away. I am susceptible to such bouts of introspection.

What follows is the –somewhat processed —outcome of such activity:

(The above is the result of personal summer tinkering)

To my mind words are very similar to pebbles: pebbles come in a motley of shapes and colours that nature has carved and imprinted on them. Likewise words carry all kinds of meanings – present and obsolete—and different emotional loads for each user.

 Words are age-old like the rocks from which the pebbles were chiselled off by the patient force of the wind and the rain before depositing themselves where they are currently situated.

Words, like pebbles, are dynamic, broadening or narrowing their meaning, rising or falling in popularity similarly to pebbles which are here this moment but perhaps elsewhere the next.

Both pebbles and words are at anyone’s disposal; all one needs to do is pick a few and start creating with them – images or texts, simple or more complicated. In different arrangements and structures, they can take on innumerable forms and meanings. 

Pebbles are hardly loved by the masses. Only a few romantics still observe them noticing the tiny cracks in them – wounds that the passage of time has left on them – or the marks etched on them in their scrapes against a myriad of obstacles in their erratic path. Words also bear the scars of their use or abuse.

Finally, in the same way that pebbles constitute the traces of the workings of nature since time immemorial, words are the evidence of the evolution of mankind.