The Slowly Living Layer

     Last week I wrote about the Living Layer of Mother Planet, and the fact that humans are a fully integrated part of that layer.
     One of my readers wrote to me, saying: “All that rock and inanimate stuff contains essential minerals that give life to humans and other living creatures.  When I realized this, I started to believe that God was present even in the rocks.” This sentiment anticipated my plan for writing this week!
     For several years I practiced out of Nan’s Rock Shop in Nova Scotia, and although I did not train as a crystal worker I learnt a great deal while I was there. I was blessed to have as colleagues gifted people who work with the energies of rocks and crystals.
     A crystal is a mineral which has flat surfaces which meet at regular angles. The origin of crystals is in pressure and heat and being forged in the kilns of the earth herself.  
     Crystals need a place to form. In the lava flows that result in the rocks we know as granite, mineral crystals are stunted and irregular: their growth limited by their solid environment.
     Crystal faces and points may be hexagonal or tetragonal or another of seven possibilities. Their atoms, molecules or ions are arranged in three dimensions of order. To bloom into the facets we admire, they must have room in those three dimensions to align their atoms into grids and lattices. For this they require a liquid or gaseous space which permits expansion.
     Crystals look to us inanimate because their growth happens on a ‘geological’ time-scale, a scale so massive that the human mind can barely comprehend it. Our fleeting lifetimes are mere blinks in the time–space where crystals proliferate and flourish.
     Crystals pick up and transmit electromagnetic waves. When human imagination suggested a technology for communicating across time and space, it was crystals which facilitated radio signals and launched our society’s communication age.
     All thoughts are electromagnetic waves. It seems arrogant to suggest that crystals are incapable of engaging in communication of their own: that they have existed through the ages awaiting the thought-waves we impose upon them.
     Crystal therapy harnesses the power and ideas that have been imbued in living rock, permitting transmission of those vibrations and energies.
     In some, the atoms are believed to have aligned with off-earth gravities. Those aligned with the moon are carriers of all the attributes we associate with the moon. Moonstone is said to promote intuition, inspiration and introspection. Selenite, named for Selene, the Greco-Roman moon goddess, brings mental clarity and aids in finding inner peace.
     Sunstones transmit energetic signatures of healing, protection and success. They can provide extra energy in times of stress or sickness, and increase our abilities to self-heal our bodies.
     The rocks of the earth are deemed in some cultures to be our ancestors. They have witnessed a history longer than our memories or stories can reach. Instead of dismissing or ignoring them as somehow unimportant, they deserve to be honoured and respected for the knowledge they hold and the power that they reveal.