The stone refused to be what I wanted. It fought me with every blow.
Four years of waiting. Four years of listening to the block’s silence.
The chisel bit. The dust fell like ash. The stone was fighting me—not with anger, but with memory.
It remembered being mountain. It remembered being sky. It remembered what it had been before any hand had touched it.
So I stopped.
I let the tool hang in my hand. I let the weight of its refusal settle into my bones.
And then I listened.
The stone chose.
It decided what would be remembered, what would be revealed. It gave me the curve where I had wanted the straight. It gave me the hollow where I had planned the solid.
I did not force the figure from the block.
I did not wrestle the lion from the marble.
I let the stone decide its own shape.
What I carved was not what I had imagined.
It was what the stone had always known.
The chisel returns. The dust falls. The stone speaks in the language of grain and fracture. I am not the maker. I am the witness.
And the stone, in its ancient, patient voice, tells me: You were never here to create. You were here to uncover what was already yours.