Handing over a crisp lonesome fiver for a bag of fresh piping hot donuts, standing in the bustling pedestrian throng of Swanage Christmas market, I glance behind the sugary treat stall and spy the crystal shop twinkling like fool’s gold in the street beyond.
Magnetised suddenly, I follow my nose, man on a mission, into the bright-lit mecca store of this Dorset town high street.
I have a rare crystal in the forefront of my mind, and it’s taken years to locate it. Stepping through the front door, masked-up like an Indiana Jones tomb raider, my quartz antennae is on full alert. The ‘Desert Rose,’ found in arid desert environments from Morocco to Mongolia, is, I faithfully concur, the missing piece of the puzzle in my quest for protection from my nemesis, the Blackheart Man.
Back in the day, I would have laughed in the face of crystal aficionado’s – as one rose quartz short of a full-time geology lecturer – but today is different. Pouring over, picking-up and inspecting the shops rock merchandise, I flashback to a far-out fella who first introduced me to crystals in my student days.
He, who shall remain nameless, was an acid frazzled student at the University of Sussex, who you would find digging up the lawns outside his halls of residence in the pre-dawn hours desperately trying to locate his buried tourmaline. To the plain cynic and uninitiated, this looked like ethereal mumbo-jumbo, but for this crystal lover it held the holy grail to his Missing in Action mojo.
He took great solace in his crystals and had a collection to rival the most avid of fanatics. Dedicating a corner of his dingy squalid room to these earthly rocks, he had a shrine of crystals, from jade to gemstones, from amethyst to obsidian, and, he fathomed, all had pulsating energy and vibration to sooth, stimulate, and arouse the most jaded of souls.
Decades later, in the Summer of Discontent, I curiously found myself under the maddening spell of these geological wonders, when the Voices first began their military occupation of my soul.
A stone-cold belief in their transformative powers took me on a fool’s errand – to deliver an obsidian stone for protection into the palm of Jamaican reggae legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. This mission impossible took me to the Jazz Café in Camden, where I crashed the after party, pressed the shiny black stone into the great man’s hand, and was met with a quizzical smile of wisdom, wonder, and bemusement.
As the shop owner plucks her solitary ‘Desert Rose’ from the exotic window display, I am feeling the heat-seeking thrill of the crazed crystal hunter. Ever since the Voice of the Blackheart Man laid waste to my recovering mojo in the long hot summer of the first Lockdown, I have been searching for this stone in my life.
And gazing upon the sandy brown, unfurled ‘rose’ petals of this rare crystal, I wonder how it might train the wilful mind, sharpen the gritted emotions, and raise the pain barrier stakes, in future battles with my arch nemesis. An amulet of sorts then, for these dark post-millennial demon days.
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