Okay, I admit it.  I have rocks in my head.  Yes, it’s true.  I spend quite a bit of time noticing them, hunting for them, collecting them and enjoying them.  There — it’s out in the open.  I’ve had a love for my sturdy, dependable friends since I was a child; and there are few things I enjoy more than infecting another young mind with my passion for minerals.  I love their varied colors.  I love the surprise of a vein of crystals in the middle of a seemingly ordinary stone.  I love the calm vibration I feel when I touch a piece of jasper and lower my own vibration in response.  Is it any surprise that one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned has been from a piece of my favorite mineral?

Last Spring I had been on a walk through a muddy field on a drizzly day, and I had filled my cloth bag with a number of chunks of jasper.  They all looked pretty much the same — dull, brown, and muddy.  I was coming to the end of a period of healing after a very long time of sadness and hurt and distrust of my own worth.  As I began to wash the rocks I had collected that day, I was struck with an awareness that taught me a whole lot more about myself than it taught me about geology.  I wrote it right away — for myself, and for a dear friend who had helped me rediscover who I had buried under a coating of pain and debris. (Thank you, G.)

I want to share it with you today, because I think the message is a universal one; and I can’t imagine anyone I know who wouldn’t benefit from its reminder.  I also want to share it because a friend of a friend apparently is in a place where she needs to know that she still exists, in all her created beauty, under the stuff that life has heaped on her.  So here it is — A Story of Healing — courtesy of my favorite piece of jasper.

Here is the deep red, crystal-coated stone that lay under all that mud.  Believe me when I tell you that the photo doesn’t begin to do it justice.  I keep this favorite on my shelf where it can remind me not to lose who I really am under what happens as I go through life.