Sixty layers of crushed stone
Last week I wrote about seeds in the dark, about invisible first movements. I keep seeing that pattern everywhere.
I came across an artist while researching the book. His name is Makoto Fujimura, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about his process. He paints with crushed minerals — azurite, malachite, gold leaf, ground shells — mixed with hide glue and applied to the canvas one layer at a time. Each layer has to dry before the next one goes on.
One of his paintings has over sixty layers.
I’ve never seen one in person, but even on a screen you can tell something is different. The colors don’t sit flat. They blend in ways that give the painting a dimensionality behind its surface, like there’s more in there than one layer could produce. Because there is.
The pigments are actual minerals, some of them millions of years old, ground to powder before they become paint. The stone has to be broken before it can become beautiful.
And the glue holding all those layers together is organic, perishable. Crushed stone bound by something fragile. Paul said we carry treasure in jars of clay, so that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. Fujimura paints like that’s literally true.
He spent seven years in Japan learning the technique from a master, and he calls it “a slow process that fights against efficiency.”
Rachel and I have been remodeling a house. It’s taken far longer than either of us expected, and we’re ready to be done. There are days when the temptation is to cut corners, skip steps, get to move-in. And nobody around us would blame us for it.
But Fujimura’s whole life is an argument against that. He recently wrote that “to be human is to be a maker of beauty and a steward of justice.” A maker. A steward. Not someone optimizing for outcomes, but someone whose work itself is an act of worship.
Sixty layers of crushed stone, each one dried before the next goes on. That’s what formation looks like, I think. Each layer too thin to see on its own. Each one necessary.
The thirty-seventh layer looks exactly like the thirty-sixth.
Do it anyway. Sixty layers.
This week’s practice:
Where are you laying down layers nobody can see? The prayer you keep praying. The habit you keep showing up for. The relationship you keep investing in without visible return.
What if the hiddenness isn’t failure? What if that’s exactly how it’s built?
More next week,
Rex
P.S. Remember those tiny pots on the window ledge? I see a few green shoots poking up through the dirt.