Recovering the treasure.

panelmaking1
Originally uploaded by Greg Blosser.

I saw myself rooting around in a large pile of stones and gravel. I was looking for something. I'm not sure what it was. Something valuable. A diamond perhaps. Or a painting of great value or maybe some other work of art. I don't know how I knew, but I knew there was some great treasure hidden in this place. Burried. And it had to be uncovered. I'd been asked to recover it. But the field of rocks and debris was large and expansive. And there was dust everywhere and I couldn't find the treasure. Only rocks. I started to get angry with the rocks. Surely if I could just clear these rocks away, if I could eliminate these stones, haul them off, then surely I would see clearly where the treasure was hidden.

Then I saw it. It was in my hand. A stone. Like all the other thousands of stones that lay scattered and stacked around me. As I prepared to discard the stone, to toss it aside, I saw that it was not a stone of no consequence. It had a form. An edge. A corner. It had been hand worked. It was broken, yes. And dusty. But it was not random. This stone had been labored over long ago by some great artisan. Some master mason had formed this stone. Then as I looked around me I began to see it. These stones, all of them, were like the one in my hand. This was not a field of random stones. I was standing amidst the rubble of some ancient edifice.

Each of these stones had it's place in the architecture. They could be cleaned. Polished. Reparied. Maybe the stones could be re-assembled, this temple rebuilt. The broken and jagged rocks were not concealing the treasure. They were the treasure. To uncover the beauty was not a matter of discarding what was of no value, or digging beneath what was there, but rather of seeing the value in what lay all around, in plain sight and doing the hard work of repairing what was shattered.

Now I could see order. That stack of stones to my left must have been the south wall. This pile near my feet seems to have been a column, perhaps a portion of some marvelous collonade. And the gravel... the small pieces, blue and green, red and white, not gravel at all. This was a tiled floor. A mosaic. There was once a picture beneath me. It told a story. This too is a part of the treasure I was told to recover.

I knealt down and took a small colorful shard of broken stone and placed it against another. The pieces fit. The work begins.