Simple and Beautiful

I was walking in the Bavarian forests in the outskirts of Munich just a little while ago (and no Tania... not the one inhabited by those fabled "little black bears"!). There is something of the "Brothers Grim" in the forests in Bavaria, and your imagination flutters ahead of you urging your eyes to conjure every tree into a wizard... every flower into a faerie.







Everything in Nature is lyrical in its ideal essence... tragic in its fate... comic in its existence... Somewhere along the dirt forest floor beneath the leaf-flecked sky I picked up a little work of art - a collection of six pebbles. Simple and beautiful! And as I held that little mosaic masterpiece in my palm, I had to smile. Six singular volumes of lithic-literature! What stories would they have to tell? If I put them close to my ear and kept really quiet and listened really hard, perhaps I would hear them whisper...


Do you remember your first lessons in geography in secondary school when you clustered around your teacher and learnt "that rocks come in three basic forms: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic". I prefer to remember what a very wise person told me "Rocks go wherever they want, and no one can stop them. If you see a rock anywhere, it's there because it wants to be." And as I look at the six smooth adamantine gems in my hand, I know somehow in my heart that they wanted to be where I found them...

There is a deep power that rushes and roars beneath the smooth ripples of a river, and yet hides behind the turn of a leaf and between the rings within a tree's trunk... There is a flawless and simple eternity of wisdom that our busy minds attempt to convolute into equations, and we fail to understand... and fail again and yet again. It is the same magic that coaxes daffodils into the Spring air every year... that sculpts each snowflake... that wrings tears from a cello and that teaches the most hurt of hearts to dare to love again.

And as I look at these six pebbles in my hand, each kneaded, chiseled and personalised out of the myriad combinations of terrain, gradient and earth from places I have never known and may never ever see in my lifetime, I know that this same wonderful and unexplainable magic brought them to me.

I will not attempt to understand. I will simply hold them and smile.

So simple... and beautiful.



flawless light in a darkening air alone...
and shining there
love will not elude you
love is simple


i worship this tenacity and
the beautiful struggle we're in
love will not elude us
love is simple


be sure to know
that all in love
is ours
and love, as a philosophy
is simple


i am calm in oblivion calm,
as i ever have been
love will not elude me
love is simple


be sure to know that all in love is ours...
is ours...
that all in love is ours
and love, as a philosophy is simple...
and ours...

~~~