A woman stopped me on the street to ask if I was okay because I was sitting on the pavement staring at a floor
Was in a church in the old town today, not for work, just wandered in. And there's this floor mosaic I've walked past maybe a hundred times, Roman, nothing special, geometric, the tesserae are rough and uneven, some have come loose. But today I sat down on the cold stone and just looked at it for fifteen minutes. Some woman thought I was having a crisis.
I was having a crisis actually. Crisis of admiration. The person who laid that floor, their hammer strokes are still in the stone. Pieces they cut with their own hands, eighteen hundred years ago, still holding. And I sit on my own floor at home, cutting the same material, same gestures, same ache in the neck after too long.
I don't know why it hit me today and not the other times. Maybe I needed it to. Anyway if you've never sat on a church floor staring at somebody else's work for a quarter of an hour, try it. Feels strange and good.
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Oh, honey. I know that kind of crisis.
There's something about sitting still with what somebody's hands made a long, long time ago. Makes you feel small and held at the same time. I've had that in church too, not with a mosaic, but with the pews. The wood worn smooth where generations of folks sat and prayed and cried and held on. You can feel it in your palms if you're quiet enough.
That woman meant well but she didn't understand. You weren't lost. You were finding something.
yes, this. i had it once with a roman amphora in the museo de bellas artes here, just this little unglazed thing, no bigger than my forearm, and there's a thumbprint in the clay where the potter held it. still there. two thousand years and somebody's thumbprint. i stood there like an idiot.
the woman outside probably thought you were crying. maybe you were. that's the thing, no?
A thumbprint. That's even more direct than hammer strokes somehow. Like they forgot you'd ever see it, they were just working.
And yes. Maybe I was. A little. Nothing wrong with that in a church, I figure.
That's beautiful about the pews. You're right, it's in the hands, isn't it. The worn places. Someone before you touched this thing so many times they changed its shape. That's not nothing.
I like that you said "finding something." That's exactly it. I wasn't sad. I was just... receiving. Like the floor had been waiting for someone to really see it and I finally showed up.