A Season of Reading
Stone Soup became the focal point of this application in an unexpected but deeply formative way.
During a season of life marked by narrowed boundaries and forced stillness, I was finally afforded something I had long lacked... uninterrupted time to read. I turned to books that had always lived on my "someday" list: Great Expectations, Dante's Inferno, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and others of that caliber.
Very quickly, I discovered that reading these works required more than time... it required humility. I found myself keeping a dictionary close at hand, because the language of these books was rich, layered, and often unfamiliar. At times I merely suspected the meaning of a word; more often, I realized I did not truly understand it at all.
Words We've Lost
As I read... pausing, looking up words, rereading passages... I began to feel a quiet remorse. Not regret for the difficulty of the language, but for how many of these words had once been part of the common English imagination and had quietly slipped away from everyday use.
Words that carried precision, moral weight, texture, and depth... now largely unused, and therefore unfelt.
In the Victorian era, words like "magnanimous" and "sagacious" flowed naturally in everyday conversation. Today, we recognize 40,000 words but use only 1,000 to 3,000 in daily speech. When we lose words, we lose nuance. We lose awareness. We lose connection.
A Question Worth Pursuing
Out of that reflection came a question: What if learning words could be joyful again? Not through drills or memorization, but through story... shared story... within a family or community.
That question was not entirely new to me.
Stones from Lake Michigan
Years earlier, when our children were young, I had brought home smooth, flat stones I had collected along the shore of Lake Michigan... rounded and softened by years of waves and sand. From time to time, I would place those stones into a pot and begin to cook as the children gathered close, watching, asking questions, listening.
Working for many years as an executive chef had given me the technical confidence to make even a simple soup feel like something ceremonial. The process mattered... the order, the patience, the sounds, the smells. And the story mattered just as much. As the soup slowly came together, so did the telling.
The children loved it. Not just the meal, but the idea of it. It became something they talked about with their friends at school... "Guess what we had last night... stone soup..."
Those moments lingered longer than I realized.
Characters Who Live Their Words
So when I returned to the Stone Soup story later in life... this time carrying questions about language, meaning, and what we pass on... I saw it differently. I began to imagine the story told in the spirit of Pilgrim's Progress: a journey where each character embodies a virtue, a disposition, or a struggle. What if each character's name itself was drawn from one of those neglected words... words once used to describe the shape of a soul?
Each character, then, would not merely carry a word, but live it. Their actions, choices, and relationships would reflect the word's true meaning. Over time, readers would not simply learn definitions... they would recognize them.
What Stone Soup Has Become
The result is what Stone Soup has become: an interactive retelling of a familiar story, layered with language, memory, and discovery... inviting readers of all ages to recover words, reclaim understanding, and remember that shared stories, like shared meals, are how communities are formed.
The stones may be ordinary... but what gathers around them never is.