Slice of Life Challenge – March 30 – Rockhounding and Crystals – Part 2 (Continued from Tuesday)

After long conversations about the wellness benefits of stones and crystals with one of my daughters, imagine my surprise when I arrived home to find a box on my doorstep from her! It was heavy – mailed at the flat rate, and filled with individually bubble-wrapped crystals and stones. I felt like I was playing the Saran Wrap game at Christmas where it’s filled with all sorts of treasures and you have small bursts of time to unwrap it, keeping what you can before it’s time to pass it to the next person. Only I got to keep all of it!

And what treasured gifts these are! Perhaps the most touching of all are the handwritten pages explaining every stone, telling of its qualities and a few personal notes scattered throughout – the most cherished one on the Lapis Lazuli note, explaining how my daughter feels close to my late mother as she still wears her bracelet filled with these brilliant blue stones. My mother, as it turns out, had jewelry made of a variety of stones and also suffered from anxiety. We continue to learn more about my mother and to “connect the dots” long after she has passed. It’s not surprising to learn that she, too, knew the benefits of stones. I often wear her jade necklace and some of her other stones that she wore frequently.

For Christmas, I’d given my daughter and her boyfriend a rockhounding kit filled with all the tools they needed for their hobby of exploring and digging for stones in the desert. In this shipment, she included some stones she’d purchased, and some that she had rockhounded herself, straight out of the earth. Those are pretty special stones to me.

And as I read my favorite childhood poem that I shared on March 17, I’d been inspired with my new knowledge of stones to turn from the plastic Mardi Gras beads and the green glass beads to stones of green black dot Jasper in my quest to be more nymphatic in my replies of NO. And they work. I’ve said no several times, becoming the goddess of refusal.

Now I shall continue to explore the benefits of these stones, using the starter kit my daughter sent me. I have placed them all on the dyed slice of agate (flat stone) and will experiment with the healing powers of each. For now, I am including pictures of the stones she sent, along with her notes. Enjoy!

My coffee table after opening the box of surprises from my daughter