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sunshine_challenge stone for this year is Rose Quartz, which I haven't had much in-person interaction with.
Love and compassion toward other people is always easier for me than love and compassion toward myself. Some of that is because I spent my childhood in a belief that the only way to avoid ridicule from my peers was to never give them an opportunity to seize upon. I still made friends and hung around with people and got ridiculed all the same, for my failures and for things that I was too socially awkward and self-unaware to notice in my own. Some of that is because fairly shortly into my working career, I had to return to that mindset to keep my employment, where the person who was never supposed to get an opportunity was my supervisor. And because my first relationship on my own, out of university, was with someone who I was incompatible with but who wanted to keep me around for the benefits I provided to her. (And I didn't notice what was probably obvious to others, or if I did, I didn't act on them in a timely manner, because I had been convinced that her health and safety would be harmed greatly if I left.) So I've never really given myself the opportunity to fail and for things to be okay from that failure.
When I do succeed, I tend to think of it as meeting the standard, rather than anything special or over the top of worthy of additional praise. Especially for things that aren't difficult to do. (Bex would like a word with us about that attitude.) What isn't hard for me, though, may be mind-boggling for others. Or, what's not hard for me, because I have professional training and/or many years of experience working with (and sometimes breaking) is intensely useful for someone else. I can take that large amount of knowledge and experience and consolidate it down into "Click here," or to stare at a script and its paltry documentation and understand it well enough to adapt it for my own purposes, or to put on a program that's rich in good professional practice that's invisible to others, or to treat a child with the requisite seriousness that the professional standard demands or other such things. But it's easier and safer not to think good things about yourself for these things, lest someone else decide you're a Tall Poppy and need to be cut down, or a weird freak with weird interests that normal people don't get excited about.
A lot of love and compassion for the self and others stems from the understanding that even with their failures and foibles, someone is still pretty swell. Or does neat things apart from their failures that still make them worthy of love and kindness. Or, as the concept translated as lovingkindness (Maitrī or mettā) in Buddhist and Vedic thought suggests, developing an underlying love and benevolence toward all people, even the ones who are opposed to you. It's not passivity, though, but a sincere motivation for all people to be happy and free from suffering. These are easy things to extend to other people, whose lives you may not know as completely as your own, even if you're on their access list and see the protected posts about things less Insta-worthy than public consumption receives. And because being outside a thing can give perspective that being inside it does not. (After all, that's what agony aunts and Am I The Asshole are for.) To extend the same love and compassion that you would give to others to yourself, who you know intimately well about all the things and the perceived reasons why, well, there's a reason that therapists will always be with us. For a lot of people, it's hard and it requires us to push back on messages that are so ubiquitous in culture that they might as well be water or air.
For as much as mindfulness is a hot topic for the hordes looking to make a dollar in pop culture, the actual point of it is to gain that outside perspective on things so that, ideally, you stop chasing and getting wrapped up in thoughts and their associated what-ifs and anticipations (both good and bad ones.)
Stop. Breathe.
May you be free from suffering. Because,
The other major association I have with Rose Quartz is the Steven Universe character, a figure who is mostly defined by her absence. Rose Quartz is Steven's mother, and by the accounts we receive of her at three beginning of the show, she's loved and missed terribly, because she disappeared about the same time that Steven came into existence. So Steven has been alive in a world where his mother isn't, raised by his dad and his mother's Gem friends, who are all doing the best they can to parent him in Rose's absence. We get to see flashbacks of Rose from the perspective of other characters, primarily Pearl, who was closest to Rose, and Greg, Steven's father, who fell in love with Rose.
The best thing about Steven Universe, the show, is that as Steven matures and gains a more complex understanding of the world, the characters around him do the same, and that includes Rose Quartz, despite being Person Not Appearing In His Life. Because Steven begins to manifest the abilities of his mother, summoning a shield, a sword, and a bubble that he can use to protect himself and others or to put a corrupted Gem in stasis once they've been "poofed" (had enough damage done to their hard light bodies that they need to retreat and recharge themselves.) And he meets Lion, Rose Quartz's assistant, almost familiar, who happens to be a dimensional portal, as well, to an airless space (Gems don't need to breathe) where a lot of the artifacts associated with Rose exist for Steven to find and bring out. Later on, Steven funds out that his tears and spit have healing properties and can do some very interesting things when applied to different situations. (Steven heals Lapis's cracked Gem this way, for example.)
(There's an entire digression here about how Steven is the Shield, the protector who is reluctant to be aggressive against his foes, despite being seen as a great threat, and Connie, his best friend, is the Sword, ambitious and driven, trying to find a way to cut herself out of the cultural strictures surrounding her, and it's only Stevonnie, the fusion of the two, who we ever see wielding both of them at once, that's not germane to talking about Rose Quartz past the point that Steven is always looking for love, compassion, and healing for everyone, but is another of those interesting details present to those who are looking at the show in the way that makes it apparent.)
As Steven becomes more competent and able with his abilities, he starts going on missions with the Crystal Gems to capture the corrupted Gems and learns, through Pearl, that Rose was their leader, someone who rebelled against Homeworld and the Diamond Authority to protect the Earth from being strip-mined and destroyed to create more Gems to expand the reach of the empire. Because Rose fell in love with Greg and fought to protect him. Which gets spun a bit more as Rose, the fierce fighter and the loving leader, fighting to protect the unique (as all of the Crystal Gems are unique in some way that Homeworld society disapproves of) against the demands of conformity, because that's a way better recruiting slogan than "Help me keep my bae alive." Further revelations about Rose showcase to Steven that to give birth to him, Rose had to give up her entire corporeal form, and it's Rose's Gem embedded in Steven as a completely unique person, a human-Gem hybrid. Rose's decision to do this is treated with ambivalence by both Pearl and Greg, rather than as a given or the perfect culmination of motherly love and sacrifice. Rose did it because she wanted to give Greg a child (possibly because she believed it was the ultimate gesture of love), but the situation it left Greg with (raising a child and having lost the person he fell in love with) is definitely not treated as anything but tragic for everyone involved. She is missed and loved and both Greg and Pearl wish she could still be there to help raise Steven.
The entire series' perception of Rose Quartz changes dramatically with episode 18 of the fifth season, "A Single Pale Rose." By this point in the narrative, the Diamond Authority has made itself much clearer as the antagonists of the series, and Steven has learned there are supposed to be four Diamonds in charge, but there are only three right now: Blue, White, and Yellow. (Through careful examination of the sigil of the Diamond Authority, an astute viewer can derive the conclusion that there should be four Diamonds and one is missing well before the narrative explains it to us.) There should be a Pink Diamond as well, but the history and story of Homeworld says that Pink Diamond was murdered by the traitor, Rose Quartz, and her Gem shattered, such that the death is permanent. The murder is what ultimately brought Homeworld's full wrath to bear on Earth, where the Diamonds unleashed a destructive ray in a bid to destroy the murderer and anyone who took up arms with her. (What it actually did, as Steven will discover in a subsequent episode, was transform and corrupt the Gems that were left behind and not protected by Rose Quartz, including the Homeworld Gems, into the monsters that made up much of the early seasons of the show that Steven had to defeat and then bubble.) On the assumption that their destructive ray worked, the Diamond Authority essentially left Earth alone until Steven and the Crystal Gems re-establish contact with Homeworld by accident and the Diamond Authority resolves to finish what they started.
During discussions of Pink Diamond, there are several times where Pearl covers her mouth and gasps, where the context suggests she's reacting to what's being said about Pink. "A Single Pale Rose" explains that Pearl is not reacting that way because of what's being said, she's reacting that way because she was sworn to a very dark secret, and the person who made her swear had sufficient authority over her that she physically cannot speak the secret aloud. Instead, Pearl engineers to lose her cell phone inside her own mind and ask Steven to retrieve it, which allows Steven to witness Pearl's memories about Rose Quartz. (The other subtle hint was to what the secret is and how what is to follow is achieved is that Pearl points out that Gem bodies, as such, are really hard light projections they have control over. Amethyst regularly takes advantage of this to shapeshift into all sorts of different forms, while the other Gems generally refrain from doing so. (It's a lovely meditation on how Amethyst is constantly trying to find the place she belongs and is trying out many methods to fit it before she finds the Famethyst and they accept her for who she is, because she's like them and they can relate to her.) Amethyst points out that holding a shifted form takes effort and practice and that reverb the best Gems at it find it exhausting to do for me than a few hours.)
The memory that Steven witnesses is not just the shattering of Pink Diamond, but the revelation that what all of the universe saw was staged. Pink Diamond faked her own death to get away from the Diamond Authority, taking up the guise of Rose Quartz, the Gem that shattered her, (Pearl projected herself as Rose Quartz for the actual shattering scene) so as to spare the Earth and get away from things, believing that nobody cared enough about her to bother doing anything. She was very wrong about that, but for Steven, the revelation is that his absent mother was not Rose Quartz, freedom fighter and absent but loving and compassionate mother, mentor, and mate, but Pink Diamond, and the powers he's manifesting are Diamond-class abilities. After this episode, now that everyone knows the secret that Pearl was commanded to keep, almost everyone discards the persona of Rose Quartz when they talk about her, because she was, from the very beginning, a construction. Specifically one about love and compassion for oneself and others, rejecting the fundamental idea of Homeworld and the Diamond Authority of strict castes and behaviors for those worthy enough to be considered part of Us and a complete disregard for anyone else as unimportant or their worlds as anything else but resources to be exploited and colonized by Us. It was something that Pink Diamond had to work at every day of her existence as Rose Quartz, once she decided to break with the society she was raised in. (To some degree, that makes Pink Diamond's origin story resemble that of the Buddha Shakyamuni, although she chose to reincarnate as Steven, a human (and thus the best chance at achieving nirvana) from her good karma rather than remain as the god she was and keep striving to change the world for the better in the face of the other gods not really doing much good on their own.)
Rather than the discarding of Rose being a bad thing, I think it's a good thing and supposed to be seen that way by the narrative, because everyone, to some degree, sees Steven as the successful integration of both Pink and Rose, the point where it no longer takes effort to be the person you want to be, because you have become them. (Whether the others approve of it is a different matter entirely.)
The bonus gem is Topaz, which only shows up a little bit in Steven Universe, as high level soldiers and as personal guards for various high-ranking Gems. (Quartzes and related Gems are frontline soldiers and field commanders, so Pink chose well what form to take in starting her rebellion.) As gemstones, topazes can take on several different hues, or no hue at all, but their most common association is yellow topaz, a stone that, because of its proximity to the color of gold, has the association of bringing prosperity to those that have them. It was also a stone thought to bring the favor of one's superiors, to reconcile differences and clear impediments, and protect persons against malice. When you go researching that kind of thing, though, you find that topaz was a bigger category than it is now, and several stones that now have names of their own were once called topazes. So, in combination, the love and compassion of rose quartz might be amplified and focused through the use of topaz to do the most work possible from the effort. Whether that manifests as the focusing of light to magnify its power to burn away impediments or as the constant and steady rush of water to wear down and escape through the cracks (or swell and flood over the barrier of in place to try and control it), actions rooted in genuine love and compassion for others, and not the selfish impulses to control and subjugate, will find others to help them focus and to clear away the impediments in their way.
sunshine_challenge stone for this year is Rose Quartz, which I haven't had much in-person interaction with.Soft pink in color, Rose Quartz has been a popular stone since as far back as 800-600 BCE. Today, as in the past, it’s most associated with love, compassion, and healing in all its forms both towards oneself and others. In the Greek myths it’s mentioned at least twice: once where Eros is said to have brought it to man to inspire love, and again in the story of Aphrodite and Adonis where it came to represent love triumphant. It’s a stone of beauty and sentiment and will likely be favored for years to come.
Love and compassion toward other people is always easier for me than love and compassion toward myself. Some of that is because I spent my childhood in a belief that the only way to avoid ridicule from my peers was to never give them an opportunity to seize upon. I still made friends and hung around with people and got ridiculed all the same, for my failures and for things that I was too socially awkward and self-unaware to notice in my own. Some of that is because fairly shortly into my working career, I had to return to that mindset to keep my employment, where the person who was never supposed to get an opportunity was my supervisor. And because my first relationship on my own, out of university, was with someone who I was incompatible with but who wanted to keep me around for the benefits I provided to her. (And I didn't notice what was probably obvious to others, or if I did, I didn't act on them in a timely manner, because I had been convinced that her health and safety would be harmed greatly if I left.) So I've never really given myself the opportunity to fail and for things to be okay from that failure.
When I do succeed, I tend to think of it as meeting the standard, rather than anything special or over the top of worthy of additional praise. Especially for things that aren't difficult to do. (Bex would like a word with us about that attitude.) What isn't hard for me, though, may be mind-boggling for others. Or, what's not hard for me, because I have professional training and/or many years of experience working with (and sometimes breaking) is intensely useful for someone else. I can take that large amount of knowledge and experience and consolidate it down into "Click here," or to stare at a script and its paltry documentation and understand it well enough to adapt it for my own purposes, or to put on a program that's rich in good professional practice that's invisible to others, or to treat a child with the requisite seriousness that the professional standard demands or other such things. But it's easier and safer not to think good things about yourself for these things, lest someone else decide you're a Tall Poppy and need to be cut down, or a weird freak with weird interests that normal people don't get excited about.
A lot of love and compassion for the self and others stems from the understanding that even with their failures and foibles, someone is still pretty swell. Or does neat things apart from their failures that still make them worthy of love and kindness. Or, as the concept translated as lovingkindness (Maitrī or mettā) in Buddhist and Vedic thought suggests, developing an underlying love and benevolence toward all people, even the ones who are opposed to you. It's not passivity, though, but a sincere motivation for all people to be happy and free from suffering. These are easy things to extend to other people, whose lives you may not know as completely as your own, even if you're on their access list and see the protected posts about things less Insta-worthy than public consumption receives. And because being outside a thing can give perspective that being inside it does not. (After all, that's what agony aunts and Am I The Asshole are for.) To extend the same love and compassion that you would give to others to yourself, who you know intimately well about all the things and the perceived reasons why, well, there's a reason that therapists will always be with us. For a lot of people, it's hard and it requires us to push back on messages that are so ubiquitous in culture that they might as well be water or air.
For as much as mindfulness is a hot topic for the hordes looking to make a dollar in pop culture, the actual point of it is to gain that outside perspective on things so that, ideally, you stop chasing and getting wrapped up in thoughts and their associated what-ifs and anticipations (both good and bad ones.)
Stop. Breathe.
May you be free from suffering. Because,
Yes—it's amazingly true,
For whatever it's worth, Charlie Brown,
You're you.
The other major association I have with Rose Quartz is the Steven Universe character, a figure who is mostly defined by her absence. Rose Quartz is Steven's mother, and by the accounts we receive of her at three beginning of the show, she's loved and missed terribly, because she disappeared about the same time that Steven came into existence. So Steven has been alive in a world where his mother isn't, raised by his dad and his mother's Gem friends, who are all doing the best they can to parent him in Rose's absence. We get to see flashbacks of Rose from the perspective of other characters, primarily Pearl, who was closest to Rose, and Greg, Steven's father, who fell in love with Rose.
The best thing about Steven Universe, the show, is that as Steven matures and gains a more complex understanding of the world, the characters around him do the same, and that includes Rose Quartz, despite being Person Not Appearing In His Life. Because Steven begins to manifest the abilities of his mother, summoning a shield, a sword, and a bubble that he can use to protect himself and others or to put a corrupted Gem in stasis once they've been "poofed" (had enough damage done to their hard light bodies that they need to retreat and recharge themselves.) And he meets Lion, Rose Quartz's assistant, almost familiar, who happens to be a dimensional portal, as well, to an airless space (Gems don't need to breathe) where a lot of the artifacts associated with Rose exist for Steven to find and bring out. Later on, Steven funds out that his tears and spit have healing properties and can do some very interesting things when applied to different situations. (Steven heals Lapis's cracked Gem this way, for example.)
(There's an entire digression here about how Steven is the Shield, the protector who is reluctant to be aggressive against his foes, despite being seen as a great threat, and Connie, his best friend, is the Sword, ambitious and driven, trying to find a way to cut herself out of the cultural strictures surrounding her, and it's only Stevonnie, the fusion of the two, who we ever see wielding both of them at once, that's not germane to talking about Rose Quartz past the point that Steven is always looking for love, compassion, and healing for everyone, but is another of those interesting details present to those who are looking at the show in the way that makes it apparent.)
As Steven becomes more competent and able with his abilities, he starts going on missions with the Crystal Gems to capture the corrupted Gems and learns, through Pearl, that Rose was their leader, someone who rebelled against Homeworld and the Diamond Authority to protect the Earth from being strip-mined and destroyed to create more Gems to expand the reach of the empire. Because Rose fell in love with Greg and fought to protect him. Which gets spun a bit more as Rose, the fierce fighter and the loving leader, fighting to protect the unique (as all of the Crystal Gems are unique in some way that Homeworld society disapproves of) against the demands of conformity, because that's a way better recruiting slogan than "Help me keep my bae alive." Further revelations about Rose showcase to Steven that to give birth to him, Rose had to give up her entire corporeal form, and it's Rose's Gem embedded in Steven as a completely unique person, a human-Gem hybrid. Rose's decision to do this is treated with ambivalence by both Pearl and Greg, rather than as a given or the perfect culmination of motherly love and sacrifice. Rose did it because she wanted to give Greg a child (possibly because she believed it was the ultimate gesture of love), but the situation it left Greg with (raising a child and having lost the person he fell in love with) is definitely not treated as anything but tragic for everyone involved. She is missed and loved and both Greg and Pearl wish she could still be there to help raise Steven.
The entire series' perception of Rose Quartz changes dramatically with episode 18 of the fifth season, "A Single Pale Rose." By this point in the narrative, the Diamond Authority has made itself much clearer as the antagonists of the series, and Steven has learned there are supposed to be four Diamonds in charge, but there are only three right now: Blue, White, and Yellow. (Through careful examination of the sigil of the Diamond Authority, an astute viewer can derive the conclusion that there should be four Diamonds and one is missing well before the narrative explains it to us.) There should be a Pink Diamond as well, but the history and story of Homeworld says that Pink Diamond was murdered by the traitor, Rose Quartz, and her Gem shattered, such that the death is permanent. The murder is what ultimately brought Homeworld's full wrath to bear on Earth, where the Diamonds unleashed a destructive ray in a bid to destroy the murderer and anyone who took up arms with her. (What it actually did, as Steven will discover in a subsequent episode, was transform and corrupt the Gems that were left behind and not protected by Rose Quartz, including the Homeworld Gems, into the monsters that made up much of the early seasons of the show that Steven had to defeat and then bubble.) On the assumption that their destructive ray worked, the Diamond Authority essentially left Earth alone until Steven and the Crystal Gems re-establish contact with Homeworld by accident and the Diamond Authority resolves to finish what they started.
During discussions of Pink Diamond, there are several times where Pearl covers her mouth and gasps, where the context suggests she's reacting to what's being said about Pink. "A Single Pale Rose" explains that Pearl is not reacting that way because of what's being said, she's reacting that way because she was sworn to a very dark secret, and the person who made her swear had sufficient authority over her that she physically cannot speak the secret aloud. Instead, Pearl engineers to lose her cell phone inside her own mind and ask Steven to retrieve it, which allows Steven to witness Pearl's memories about Rose Quartz. (The other subtle hint was to what the secret is and how what is to follow is achieved is that Pearl points out that Gem bodies, as such, are really hard light projections they have control over. Amethyst regularly takes advantage of this to shapeshift into all sorts of different forms, while the other Gems generally refrain from doing so. (It's a lovely meditation on how Amethyst is constantly trying to find the place she belongs and is trying out many methods to fit it before she finds the Famethyst and they accept her for who she is, because she's like them and they can relate to her.) Amethyst points out that holding a shifted form takes effort and practice and that reverb the best Gems at it find it exhausting to do for me than a few hours.)
The memory that Steven witnesses is not just the shattering of Pink Diamond, but the revelation that what all of the universe saw was staged. Pink Diamond faked her own death to get away from the Diamond Authority, taking up the guise of Rose Quartz, the Gem that shattered her, (Pearl projected herself as Rose Quartz for the actual shattering scene) so as to spare the Earth and get away from things, believing that nobody cared enough about her to bother doing anything. She was very wrong about that, but for Steven, the revelation is that his absent mother was not Rose Quartz, freedom fighter and absent but loving and compassionate mother, mentor, and mate, but Pink Diamond, and the powers he's manifesting are Diamond-class abilities. After this episode, now that everyone knows the secret that Pearl was commanded to keep, almost everyone discards the persona of Rose Quartz when they talk about her, because she was, from the very beginning, a construction. Specifically one about love and compassion for oneself and others, rejecting the fundamental idea of Homeworld and the Diamond Authority of strict castes and behaviors for those worthy enough to be considered part of Us and a complete disregard for anyone else as unimportant or their worlds as anything else but resources to be exploited and colonized by Us. It was something that Pink Diamond had to work at every day of her existence as Rose Quartz, once she decided to break with the society she was raised in. (To some degree, that makes Pink Diamond's origin story resemble that of the Buddha Shakyamuni, although she chose to reincarnate as Steven, a human (and thus the best chance at achieving nirvana) from her good karma rather than remain as the god she was and keep striving to change the world for the better in the face of the other gods not really doing much good on their own.)
Rather than the discarding of Rose being a bad thing, I think it's a good thing and supposed to be seen that way by the narrative, because everyone, to some degree, sees Steven as the successful integration of both Pink and Rose, the point where it no longer takes effort to be the person you want to be, because you have become them. (Whether the others approve of it is a different matter entirely.)
The bonus gem is Topaz, which only shows up a little bit in Steven Universe, as high level soldiers and as personal guards for various high-ranking Gems. (Quartzes and related Gems are frontline soldiers and field commanders, so Pink chose well what form to take in starting her rebellion.) As gemstones, topazes can take on several different hues, or no hue at all, but their most common association is yellow topaz, a stone that, because of its proximity to the color of gold, has the association of bringing prosperity to those that have them. It was also a stone thought to bring the favor of one's superiors, to reconcile differences and clear impediments, and protect persons against malice. When you go researching that kind of thing, though, you find that topaz was a bigger category than it is now, and several stones that now have names of their own were once called topazes. So, in combination, the love and compassion of rose quartz might be amplified and focused through the use of topaz to do the most work possible from the effort. Whether that manifests as the focusing of light to magnify its power to burn away impediments or as the constant and steady rush of water to wear down and escape through the cracks (or swell and flood over the barrier of in place to try and control it), actions rooted in genuine love and compassion for others, and not the selfish impulses to control and subjugate, will find others to help them focus and to clear away the impediments in their way.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-05 08:52 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think so many of us struggle to love ourselves, to be as compassionate and understanding toward ourselves as we are toward others, and not set higher standards for ourselves than we do for everyone else.
Thank you for sharing this thoughtful post.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-06 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-05 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-06 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-06 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-06 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-07-07 01:11 am (UTC)This!!!!
Also, I have only seen the first season on Steven Universe (but I don't think I have it in me to continue on). Anyway, all of my closest IRL friends are obsessed with it and speak fondly of it often, and this discussion of Rose/Pink was so well explained that I think I finally understand what they keep talking about.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-07 01:57 am (UTC)I personally wanted more Connie in it. And I really just love Stevonnie.
But mostly, I'm glad I could bring some amount of understanding.