Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

To the sixth prompt for the sunshine_challenge, we have a really fascinating stone! (And also, a really fascinating Steven Universe character.)

In the ancient world, Amethysts were believed to hold the power to purify the body, especially from drunkenness. It was also thought that they could help cure disease, and so Amethysts were used to draw any illness out. They have been associated with royalty, nobility and spirituality because of their purple colour. In modern times, they’re used as popular semi-precious stones and are either cut into faceted gems or carved. Amethysts are also the birthstone for February.

( A Sierra Game, and a Crystal Gem )

Would that we all had supportive environments for ourselves, from the beginning of our existence to our last days as elders.

For the fourth sunshine_challenge prompt, neither stone is something that I know much about, so expect even more wandering afield than usual, and neither is a Steven Universe character, either. It also seems prudent to state up front that a lot of what I'll be talking about is from the perspective of a nonpractitioner with a lay scholarly interest. So I might screw something up, and if I do, let me know, please.

Kyanite typically ranges from light to dark blue (which gives it its name, from the Greek kyanos) and usually appears in sprays of bladed crystals. It is usually associated with calming, grounding energy, and sometimes linked to clarity and logic as well. It's a lesser-known gemstone that you won't often see in jewelry stores, but can be a beautiful, steadying presence among flashier stones.

The bonus gem is hematite, which drives its name from being the color of blood (that's the name, "blood-stone") and being an iron oxide (which gives you additional blood associations.) Doing a quick wiki dive about both stones, it turns out that they sit well on a spectrum on ends far away from each other. Kyanite's use in our world is as a stone that resists high heat, is electrically resistive, and is selectively hard (there's an alignment of its crystalline structure such that you can scratch it with a steel needle if you draw the needle parallel to the alignment, and you can't if you draw the needle perpendicular), and so is extremely useful in the production of ceramics, which need high heat to come into existence. Hematite, on the other hand, doesn't do so great in very high heat, is electrically conductive, and a lot less tough on principle. Primarily, hematite-infused clay (as ochre) is useful for pigmenting things red.

And if you went looking for hematite's primary magical application as a gemstone, you'll find all sorts of things, of course, but many of the results are about balancing energies in the body and as I've seen on at least one search engine result, passion and handling blood-related issues. Which is conveniently cherry-picked to help my narrative point, of course. If I do it right, you won't notice at all that I'm helping to frame and guide how you think and feel about these things.

( Dualism in many of its forms. Contains religion, philosophy, A:tLA and LoK, and a little Steven Universe )

Yeah, that one went places, didn't it? And that's without really leaning into exploring man-woman dualism at all, either through the philosophical, religious, or Avatar and Steven Universe lenses.

The second 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.

( Rebecca Sugar had to have known about these gem properties when she created the Steven Universe character. Spoilers abound. )

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.