Why the Blue Stones? What’s in the new name?
As a kid I spent summers on Lake Michigan, near the small town where my grandmother was born. My family loved to search for the elusive Petoskey stone on the shores of the big lake, but I was always on the hunt for something much rarer. Perhaps impossible.
I wanted to find a blue rock.
Now, bits of worn beach glass might be blue, and many of the stones were a lovely gray, but I never did find a blue rock. I found rocks with strange crosshair patterns and speckled rocks and rocks like polished eggs. But blue? Not really. When I got bored, I would touch my toes and look at the lake upside down—flip the horizon so that the water became the sky.
Sometimes the writing life feels like an ongoing search for something completely elusive. Sometimes it can feel like the blue stone we desperately want more than anything simply isn’t on this planet. Does that make the search any less wondrous? Does it make the landscape any less beautiful? I don’t think so.
What if we flipped the horizon? What if we touched our toes and looked at the lake upside down? What if we let our hair hang loose and laughed at how the water became sky? What if we went there together?