How a brief retreat led to the Oracle of Nerja. Here is the introduction of the book we are writing…
1. Prologue: Pebbles on a beach.
Suddenly things fell into place travelwise and Lulu and I ended up in Nerja — a small town on the Andalusian coast where the mountains meet the sea of Alboran and the pace of life slows to something naturally meditative. The beach at Nerja turned out to be a stoneseekers paradise. Smoothly washed oval flat pebbles from white to dark grey cover the beaches. We love to paint stones. It started as simple pleasure: picking smooth flat ones from the water’s edge, sitting together in the shade with brushes and cheap acrylic paint, making something without any particular purpose. At first we thought of making a set of rune stones. The stones were perfect size for that. I have been using the Book of Runes — Ralph Blum’s adaptation of the ancient Norse symbol system — and found it, much to my surprise, genuinely useful. I used it and other oracles, often enough that the thought eventually arose: how the hack does this work? But in Nerja we felt like creating something else – maybe something new. Then the idea surfaced: what if instead of copying an existing system, we designed one from scratch — one grounded in everything we had come to understand about the workings of the psyche? Would that work?
