GEODE UNIVERSE

By V.B. Price

….one moment your life is a stone in you,
and the next a star….
–Rainer Maria Rilke

For Robin, our beautiful families, our heart friends, and
my wonderful readers over all these years.

ANN’S GEODE

My sons were gone, taken away by a cruel divorce.
Nearly broke, broken in spirit, I was alone at Christmas.
My thrill for life had withered. I didn’t know what I needed.

Then a knock at the door. “Need a miracle?” she asked,
handing me a brown paper bag.” “Ever see a Geode?”
I had not. I reached inside, felt a round rough surface,

wrapped my hand around it and pulled it out.
It had been opened! A secret galaxy of crystals
exploded in the fire light, a joy so pure and simple

it transformed even the gloom descending on the season.
Hope returned. My boys would always be mine,
a firmament of magic in my heart. Rocks became prophets

of love never lost, if we allow the majesty of change
to thrive through our fathomless wonder at the world.

GEODE CHILDREN

Each child is the first sight
of the first geode of your life.
You don’t have to crack them open

just wait them out until they decide
to open themselves to you in their full mystery
and resplendent complexity, if you’re so lucky.

Each time a child opens, a new world,
as foggy with light as the Milky Way, waits
for us to discover it, its far corners, islands,

Oceans of surprise, black holes, hungers for truth
in a truthless world. Each child a magnifying galaxy
thriving by being found. And all that was ever

needed was our generous attention. And we learn
it’s that way, sometimes, with the whole world itself.

ALWAYS MORE

Geodes mean the inner far beyond in us.
Their luminous silence permits us to be
boisterously joyful, triumphant in our noticing,

our tender fascinations with the smallest
beauties of the day, the tiny weed flowers, purple
among the goat heads, the novas locked in stone.

Geodes show us that the world needs to be
adored by us, in all its magnificence and shy glory.
If only we could just invent a culture to do that all the time,

a culture that can’t be suppressed by the cool sarcasm
of the elegant and rarefied, those who’d shush the wind
for ruffling napkins at a picnic, those who won’t admit

to any feeling they can’t brush off like crumbs for the dog
who considers all morsels to be shining manna from afar.

IT COULD ALL BE LIKE THAT

The greatest of gifts is surely the impossible beauty
of what is. We so often only know it as a crushed
and howling mess. He must have been seven.

We gave him a geode and a hammer for Christmas
and told him it was hard as a planet and he had to smash it
with all his might. He tapped it. He hit it. He whacked it,

he scowled. “What kind of crumby present is this?”
We urged him to smack it again with everything he had.
He let the hammer fall with all his might and oh my god

the thing fell open and gleaming like the first dawn
escaping from the first night. He gasped, he whooped,
he hollered, sensing, we hoped, it could all be like that,

if he tried, childhood a memory of sunflowers pushing up
through tangling vines like starlight through a storm.

NO DARKNESS, THERE’S ENOUGH ALREADY

Those moments when we first become geodes to ourselves,
amazed to find our own heads are full of wonderings
And startlings from an unknown mother lode of our own

Imaginations—young or old, that’s when we first
find the path of clues to who we really are.
Our curiosity becomes for us a wild enchantment,

an intoxication of ideas and doubts that come to be as real
as mountains just by dreaming them up, as only we can do.
These thoughts inside our skulls seem to us sometimes

as thrilling as the stars or the minds of those we love.
We feel the genius of the human swarm in all its dignity
and folly belongs to us, each one, self-evidently equal.

That’s why its holy law: Thou shall not kill any one of us
and waste the sacred chances of the geodes of our minds.

---

Dear Reader, it’s my hope to keep writing columns intermittently through 2026 and beyond. It would not be possible for me to do this work without the generosity, deep talent, sensitivity and vision of Benito Aragon. We met after the Albuquerque Tribune folded in 2008 and have been creatively collaborating for nearly 15 years with the New Mexico Mercury and the Mercury Messenger. Our partnership has been one of the great joys of my life. Although Benito tends to work behind the scenes, his artistic energy and vision are the mainstays of this enterprise. Nothing would happen without him. My gratitude knows no bounds.

Here’s to a Christmas season filled with kindness, delight, and as much innocent merriment as the fates allow. With heartfelt thanks, VB