Member-only story
About Me — Shannon Mullen O’Keefe
Lake Superior Agates & Leadership
“Our life has to be our message.” — Thích Nhất Hạnh
Thích Nhất Hạnh reminds us that each of us is a writer — with our life’s message as our greatest story.
As a child, I collected Lake Superior agates that I found in an open field behind my home. A pack of us roamed the Central Minnesota fields in the summertime, building forts, dipping our toes in puddles, and shooing the cows away from our mothers’ dinner gardens.
The agates were a special part of those summer afternoons.
The lines were embedded in them to remind us that time passes. Time was just stuck there in those agates for everyone to see — which made those rocks really special.
It was just as if the glacier tumbled that Lake Superior rock all the way to that Central Minnesota spot at our feet and knew we’d be there someday to pick it up.
That big ice block could see the kids of Central Minnesota mattered and so it left the red-lined agate rocks there for us to find, lick and shine later.
And that’s what we’d do.
We’d pick up each rock and dust it off — if we couldn’t tell yet that it was an agate — because it was covered in the earth’s dust — we’d lick it to be sure by…
