Mortar and Pestle

Often, one must grind a spice to taste its essence.  In the kitchen, we can use a simple mortar and pestle to grind up spice seeds to release their flavour so that we can add them to some dish we are preparing.

Occasionally, on an outing, we may see a natural mortar and pestle.  Like this stone, caught in a depression in a large rock, in the inter-tidal zone of a west coast beach.  Slowly, very slowly, with each tide, the small, hard, little stone is swirled in the softer cavity, and, mixed with a little trapped sand, it gradually deepens its nest in the rock, becoming more and more established, revealing lines you'd never see, in both the stone and the rock.

A little like life itself ...