Finding Hagstones
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I am a woman obsessed with faeries who has never found a hagstone.* And believe me, it's not for lack of looking. Every time I visit the Oregon coast, especially at Short Sand Beach where the stream that flows through the crevasse in the rocks meets the ocean, I scour the water and the land for one. When I visit the local forest park with a beautiful creek that flows through it, my eyes are constantly on the ground, searching. When I visit my friend's house and we walk down to the Scioto River that flows right nearby, I look for hagstones. And somehow they just never appear.
Although I try not to let this bother me, my self-doubt worries at me, wearing away like a grain of sand or small pebble that rubs at the larger rock, forming the hagstone itself. It nudges against me, whispering "other people are more beloved by the fey. Other people have more magic. Other people can find hagstones. Some people can find them without looking. Some can find them almost everywhere they go. You just aren't as magical as they are, and you never will be."
It seems a silly small thing (literally) to get hung up on. But it bothers me. Each time I go hunting for hagstones, my heart gets filled with the same sort of excitement and hope I suppose a gambler feels when he sits at the slots and keeps waiting, waiting to feel that elated joy of the victory. Each time I think "there will be a moment, it will happen, when instead of turning over smooth rock after smooth rock, I will turn one over and that beautiful empty space will be there, that portal through which a person can spy Faerieland." And yet that moment never comes, despite my staying there until my back is sore, my fingers are cold, and my husband is shifting from foot to foot waiting patiently for me to be finished looking.
It feels like a rejection. And yet I still keep searching. But on a recent hike through those beautiful woods just a few days ago, when Tom and I were walking back from the creek, mud squelching under our boots, I had a little bit of an epiphany that helped me to feel a little bit better about my lack of discovering any magical stones.
I thought about the fact that I have hagstones at home. I have quite a few, actually. I probably have at least a dozen of them, from at least four different people. Five if you count my friend who makes her own stunning clay hagstones etched with spirals and patterns. My hagstones hail from Oregon, England, a creek bed here in my own city, Washington, Michigan, and the Buffalo River in Arkansas. And even though I've never found my own hagstone, do you know how it is I still have a precious small collection?
People gave them to me.
They gave them to me. Hagstones, these incredibly magical, powerful portals to Faerie. These rare rocks that you really have to search for to find, created by a gradual wearing away of one pebble against another stone over a long long period of time. And there are people out there who care enough about me, whose lives I've touched enough, that they willingly sent me or gifted me in person these incredible, magical artifacts.
And quite honestly, if that isn't its own type of magic, I don't know what is. It just wasn't the kind I was focused so intently on seeing or not seeing in myself.
*Technically, I found one, one time, and wrote a whole article about it, but it was the size of a dinner plate, with a hole the size of a marble, and I couldn't take it with me.
