Stone of the Month: 

April 2022 

"Final Act"

While many suiseki are seen as beautiful landscape settings, other less attractive stones can have great significance and meaning. This small ball-shaped Mikura stone, measuring 11 cm wide and 10 cm high, conveys a sense of the recycling of the elements in our natural world. In this case, it is the natural breaking down of rock into its basic elements. This degradation is in slow geological time rather than in the short span of a human’s life. This ball stone has lost most of its interior and roughly 50% of its exterior shell. If it had been left in nature, the fragile remaining parts of the shell would have been broken due to weathering. Eventually, those broken fragments would have been further reduced until only sand and silt-sized particles remained. Then these tiny pieces would likely have become part of a new lithification process occurring over millions of years into the future. This is why this stone is so meaningful.

An added feature is that this stone has been reported as belonging to the 18^th generation Tokugawa Yoshitomo collection according to information published in volume 318(3) 2016 issue of Juseki magazine. If true this is also an historically important stone.