Picture Jasper

A jasper whose cross-section carries patterns resembling landscapes. Desert, mountain range, horizon—the distribution of impurities within the mineral happens to sketch scenery.

Iron, manganese, and other oxides deposited in shifting patterns as the sedimentary environment changed. Brown is iron oxide, cream is silica, black is manganese. All geological fact. The "landscape" is merely a pattern that humans recognise.

Found in South Africa and Idaho. Within one stone, the history of a shifting depositional environment, recorded visually. Whether a landscape is seen in it belongs entirely to the viewer.

Bury yourself in the immediate and the horizon disappears. Obvious, yet the people most prone to it are planners — the ones whose job is the long view. This stone tends to stay longest with the person who can hold both: the ground underfoot and the line where the sky begins.