A short chubby little blonde lady came to my stall the other day and after engaging me in conversation for a few minutes wanted to know if I had any roast horse. Market traders get asked some strange questions, you’d better believe it, so I was in no way surprised and suggested she try the French charcuterie a few streets away and gave her directions.
The look on her face! “No, roast horse,” she stated emphatically. Now I’d realised she wasn’t dyslexic and understood what she had in mind. She’d obviously heard the name of the mineral from someone or other and got it mixed up in her head. I pointed to the piece I had on the table. Rose Quartz I said slowly, smiling. Her face immediately brightened. “Yes, that’s it,” she acknowledged, looking all pretty with a fringe of curls and two adorable dimples.
“It’s a loving stone,” I said quickly. “Peaceful and calming with lots of energy.”
It transpired that’s what she’d heard. “Silly me,” she murmured. “Can I pick it up?”
“You’re welcome, I gestured. “Here, let me hand it to you.”
As she grasped it I waited for the usual loony-moony look of rapture that accompanies the knowing enthusiast’s journey to the ethereal world of the spirit but it never came. Eyes closed I could see she was trying but wasn’t getting any of the feedback she expected. Clearly the lady wanted enlightening. “Relax,” I said softly like the Good Samaritan I was, but then somehow I heard the word charlatan instead!
Banish it from your thoughts, the traders voice snapped back in my head. You’re there to make a living not run a charity. I pulled myself together. What on earth could I have been thinking? “Yes, relax,” I repeated. “Rose Quartz is for gentleness and emotional healing. A stone that brings love and frees you of stress. Love is freedom. Emotions liberated, bringing love.”
I could hear myself saying it. Thinking what a load of old twaddle it was. I panicked. No, no… Fight against it. I was a market trader. There to ladle out bullshit in spades. I couldn’t be doing with this. Pull yourself together. Right now it looked like I needed the bloody rose quartz more that she did! Then above it all I heard her voice. What was that she was saying? She could feel I had conflict?
I can feel the conflict within you. Here, take this. Let me help you with your pain.
I looked around me, startled as never before. I was there and so was she, in front of the stall. I definitely wasn’t in bed having a nightmare. What the hell was happening to me? I took the Rose Quartz she offered and held it. Somehow everything eased. There was her smile again, eyes twinkling with merriment. It was then, only then that I understood. I’d fallen into the hands of a witch!
Her question kept coming back to haunt me. Did I have any roast horse? Had she said it deliberately? To throw me off balance? Roast horse? The idea was ludicrous. She was just another customer. An enthusiast who’d got it all wrong. In that moment I came to my senses, the conflict in me beginning to fade. I was standing there holding the quartz, nothing else.
“Feels great,” I said. It’s a fine piece of Brazilian Rose Quartz. A loving stone. Important for personal relationships more than anything else.”
“It’s like a talisman,” she replied mysteriously. “A talisman of love. Creating a spark between people.”
I agreed. You gave it to the person you cared about most. It spread compassion and understanding. Helped them to know your feelings.
She’d heard her friends talk about chakras. What was that all about?
Right, if she didn’t know about chakras she wasn’t a witch. I suddenly felt safe.
They gave rose quartz its place and its qualities, I explained. Its positioning in the 4th, the Heart Chakra, was key, and because it stimulated the Crown Chakra, the third eye and Throat Chakra, it was able to bring them all into harmony, into a unity within the heart. In that sense its energies were binding. Everything led to understanding. To a unity of love.
“That’s what gives Rose Quartz its elemental power. It’s more than a combination of atoms. If you don’t already believe in the reality of spiritual energy Rose Quartz will show you the way. Act as your guide.”
There, I was giving it my all. My crystal healing sales pitch everything it should be. Doing my best to persuade such a nice lady that the bit of rock I was holding would help her find love in her life. But then who was I to say that it wouldn’t? That if she really believed in it enough it might be possible for something to happen. Something quite wonderful really. All you needed was faith. Just like in any other religion.
But then there are believers and believers. Either you’re a scientist dedicated to experiment, to rationality and logic, or you subscribed, dare I say believed, in something else. You had religion. Believed in God or in some cases the devil. You worshipped trees, animals or idols. Bowed down to graven images and risked the wrath of Jove or Jehovah. On the other hand you might have a political creed. Had faith and in the word of the Leader. It was either God is Great, or Hitler, Stalin, or the word of the Pope. It used to be inanimate objects that gave you your faith. Then came the transcendental spirit and his supposed son, the man on the cross. His representatives on Earth followed fast until in the twentieth century men turned themselves into gods like the Fuehrer, the Beloved Leader and today’s harmless relics of absolute monarchy. It’s God Save the Queen these days and you don’t even have to stand up when you sing. That all disappeared in the nineteen-sixties.
In more recent times a new faith’s emerged on the scene. Minerals and crystals are deemed to have spiritual properties and with a wee bit of physics mixed in came energies, the buzz word for crystal healing adepts, or better call them disciples. After all, all party leaders, ideologies and faiths have disciples to help spread the word but even that wasn’t good enough. Oh no! Once an idea or a faith captured a country or most of the world it got hold of you too. Indeed it got hold of everyone. You weren’t allowed to believe in anything else. Free thinkers got burned and people who asked questions were shot. It was either one thing or another. If you believed then it had to be absolute. Doubt wasn’t allowed. No questions! If you didn’t believe you either stayed silent or faced some Inquisition or Show Trial. Christianity started things early. Kids dipped in water then they were done!
It was all there before me. There was I at my stall with Rose Quartz, love and a lady. I was selling crystals but it could have been indulgences! If I’d been an unmitigated scoundrel of a medieval monk I’d be taking the poor child to my cell in the cloisters and educating her in the pleasures of Christ the Healer but here was I, a man of scientific reason, working to support my wife’s Geology research by engaging enthusiasts of another faith with ideas I didn’t believe in.
And that was the truth of it really. It all came down to a matter of freedom. Once you fully believed in a faith, an idea or a political creed, you weren’t free anymore. Once you’d stepped onto the path you had to go all the way. You’d given up your freedom to think. It wasn’t a case of being free to choose one thing or another, once a choice was made that was it. You gave up your critical faculties. You were no longer free to assess, consider or reject. Whatever it was you’d given yourself to, now had you by the curlies. You couldn’t stand in relation to ideas anymore. Consider one thing then another. Free to think and enjoy. Proud in your understanding, confident in the power of your mind. You now belonged to something or someone else, whether they were dead or alive. Or something unreal like the spirit.
Me, my crystal and mineral stall and a lady! Who was I? Who was she? And what were the crystals between us? Me standing there smiling at her. Thinking and thinking, my thoughts running like lightning. That was it! The electrons in my brain activating the neural chemistry that caused me to consider was racing at light speed! That’s why so much was packed into just a few seconds. And I could know that because I wasn’t a faith junkie. I was a modern free thinking man. Yet what of these crystals between us?
Suddenly I saw it all for the reality it was. The stall was a bridge. A crossing point between science and faith. She had her enlightenment and I had mine. She could have been a member of some Nazi party or the Hari Krishna mob. Just imagine if the last lot took over! I’d be dancing down Oxford Street in orange pantaloons banging a tambourine! Far better than murdering millions of children.
A scientific mind on the one hand and someone hungry to enter the paradise of faith and find love through a rock on the other! And it was because once there were Popes who burned people like me that I was determined to do her no harm. Even if her faith took over one day and I’d have to kiss crystals it was still better than murder. Or was it? If your mind wasn’t free then you might as well be dead anyway.
And there it was. My stall and its crystals! As is said in the Muslim religion, a bridge between time and eternity. Yes, but then who was I to take from her the promise and prospect of love, even if it came through a stone? I had to be bigger than that. Allow my knowledge to harm no human being. Why, if I could help her find love wouldn’t that be something, for what is love but the highest, the most wonderful of feelings. As wondrous as the ability of our minds to think, to know, to understand and to be free. As long as you weren’t a slave to either. Neither a slave to love or a slave to thoughts. That’s what it means to be free.
“Wherever you’re at you’d better come out of it mister, or you won’t be selling me anything.” I heard a voice say. My thoughts moved easily. “Whatever madam wishes. It’s a very fine piece for a tenner.”
She nodded, handing me a note. “Good deal!”
Should I wrap it up for her? No, she didn’t want that, and as she said it I noticed a man draw alongside and take her hand. She looked up at him. In moments they were smiling at each other. Definitely something between them I thought and as I passed the Rose Quartz to her she gave it to him. “I thought you might like it my dear.”
“Rose Quartz!” he exclaimed. “What a beautiful piece. Thank you ever so darling.”
It was all quite enough for me. I really felt chuffed. There was something nice about him. Something I liked about both of them. It was going to a good home. I knew it for sure and in my heart I wished them all happiness, and said it as they walked arm in arm from the stall.
So where did it leave me? In my own way I too was enlightened. In that moment between them, in their look and their taking of hands I felt my own spirit soar.
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