crystal exploration: golden healer

Lately, a blessing has come into my awareness. It has been spoken in women's circles, printed in a greeting card even, its form shifting ever so slightly, but the essence remaining. 

I wish for you what you wish for yourself. 

Affirming. Empowering. Respecting autonomy, each person's wisdom, and their own unique journey, desires, and needs.

Golden healer quartz is this blessing in crystal form. Considered a master healer, it is iron-included quartz that has golden tones, often with intricacy and layers. Like paths, like worlds.

All that yellow works intimately with the solar plexus chakra, our sense of self, our personal power. The quartz it's woven into amplifies that connection. 

Golden healer will sing out the blessing - I wish for you what you wish for yourself! - but it will also help you navigate and understand exactly what it is you wish for yourself. 

 

crystal exploration: stromatolite

People often have a timeline they are most comfortable navigating - past, present, future, liminal, other - but we also often weave them together for a fuller experience in our bodies and lives. 

I can often see threads of the future. I look for sustainability and pathways, dreams that turn to goals or visions that turn to plans, the waves and the shoreline they'll touch, converse into landscapes not yet traveled. I cherish the aliveness of the present and take efforts to be wholly aware in the moments I'm living. I've never been much of a history buff or interested in family trees / genealogy, but I respect my personal past enough to break observed patterns and try to not repeat mistakes. 

In recent years, a slightly more abstract interest in ancestral healing has formed, though, with the idea that healing ourselves can heal the past and future too. Even more recently, I've participated in meditations, facilitated by The Wild Woman Project and solo, that have made me feel into the past a little more than is usual for me. And, then that past circles right around into the future, time being non-linear and continual and a mystery in itself. 

Some of this centers around the idea that within our own genetic code, within our family's experience line, so much has been navigated, so much has been endured and triumphed, so much courage has been summoned and embodied. Those lessons are in our bones and hearts. Those people energetically have our backs. There are times when I've felt their reassuring hand slip into mine. The past isn't a weight or an anchor, but a whisper in the ear, full of real substance, "You've got this."   

And, in turn, every step I take in my own life, each river traversed, is a blessing to the future, me in ancestor form also whispering, "You've got this too."  

Working with stromatolite awakens this sort of experience.

Marian McGuinness wrote for BBC, "...stromatolites are stony structures built by colonies of microscopic photosynthesising organisms called cyanobacteria. As sediment layered in shallow water, bacteria grew over it, binding the sedimentary particles and building layer upon millimetre layer until the layers became mounds. Their empire-building brought with it their most important role in Earth’s history. They breathed. Using the sun to harness energy, they produced and built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve."

Ancient wisdom. The birthing of life. Meditating with stromatolite can connect us to those rivers of origin - of our current ancestral line, of past lives, of issues buried deep within us, ones that give us strength, ones that need healed. It helps us shed and solidify. It helps us ground in our purpose. It even teaches us how to how to become good ancestors.    

References: 
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210117-stromatolites-the-earths-oldest-living-lifeforms

crystal exploration: carnelian

In her book, The Holy Wild, Danielle Dulsky writes, "...water is our embodied, sensual, moving prayer." Later, she asks, "Tell me, Priestess, where do you feel joy in your body?" 

Bodies are complex things. There's so much pressure for them to look, act, or be a certain way. Some bodies have had to navigate violation, some have ongoing pain. Our bodies are whole worlds, really, and they contain both struggle and ease. 

Yet, for me, it's one of the thrilling, ecstatic reasons to be in human form, that feeling of aliveness that comes from sensation, from allowing myself to be fully present in my body. 

I feel it when I dance. I feel it when I splash around in water, the chill contrasting with the sunshine. I feel it when I embrace or make love. I feel it when I belly laugh, or when the sky makes me tingle with awe, or when I wander through fields and woods, or when I snuggle beneath the softest of blankets, or when I jump from a zip line landing. I feel it when I hold a warm drink in the winter, have an iced one in the summer. I feel it when I brush my fingertips against the texture of leaves, trees, fabric, skin.  

Mary Oliver wrote, "You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves."

We might be moving prayers, but I think we're also the answer, always. 

  

Carnelian is an orange(ish) form of agate that ranges in color from lighter to darker and is sometimes heat treated to pull out even more color.

Online sources say it is linked to the fire element. I can understand that premise. I mean, it can even look like a flame. Here's the thing, though. Carnelian is most commonly linked to the sacral chakra, and the sacral chakra is associated with the water element even though the color assigned to the chakra is orange.   

Carnelian has many uses, but it is all about physical vibrancy, creativity, sensuality. Flow, inspiration, action, courage to be alive right here in the body and world we have. 

elements, gifts of darkness, and regenerative shadows ♡

I recently read Danielle Dulsky's The Holy Wild, a book of elemental verses, rituals, magic, and it has made me think about which elements have been weaving themselves into my life lately.

There's a place we were allowed to go for many summers before it was closed to the public. We waded through cold water into a cave, walls made of stone, earth, roots, with light and sky pouring in. Almost liminal in its contrast of dark and bright. We'd edge slowly back to meet a waterfall flowing from above us, an intense slamming rush of icy water, inevitably causing shrieks of laughter. We'd stumble-step back into sunshine, wind brushing against chilled skin. Awakened, connected, alive. More alive. Often, all the elements weave together like that for me, truly peak experiences, and water is always the home I return to.

This last couple of years, though, has had a lot of fire energy. Purging, releasing. Barren landscapes that will be ready for something more eventually. When I think it's been quite enough thankyouverymuch, I feel a discomfort that whispers and pokes until I listen, or draw a card that says WILDFIRE or BURN, or just know, and so it begins again, the spark, the loss, the transmutation.

Last night, I had a dream where I was conversing with my husband. He said that some people weren't exactly nice, but they were regenerative shadows. They helped energy to flow, ideas to form, things to happen.

The dream had a lot of threads to sift through, some toward the future and encounters to come, but it also made me think of the Mary Oliver poem entitled “The Uses of Sorrow.” She writes, “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. // It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.”

I have mourned the people I've had to walk away from, or who walked away from me, whose colors were shown, who were no longer healthy and aligned for my own life. Some of the gifts they granted me felt like gifts at the time, and others felt like energetic bruises (or worse) that gifted me insight through contrast and experience.

With that, a poem messenger. ♡