The workshop I went to on Saturday, Vivencia Sonora, lead by Irma Caceres of Queens and Susana Tapia Leon of Equador, required that we bring a quartz crystal that we would be giving up. I assumed we'd be giving the crystals away to each other, I really didn't know what was going to happen. But I didn't really like the idea of giving up any of mine, I don't have that many, and the ones I have are friends. I did have some little chunks created when we dropped a big one, so I settled on bringing those.
On my way I came across a yard sale on Windsor where a woman was giving away Quartz crystals. She had an entire basin of them. I think the wind got knocked out of me when I saw them. The woman running the sale told me she had dug them up with her own hands in Arkansas. I asked the woman they belonged to if she was a geologist, she said "No, I'm just kind of a hippy." She wanted people to take her crystals for free.
I rummaged in her crystal box for too long, I felt like the archetypal mineral crazed prospector hooting it up over a gold vein. I filled my bag with crystals. I gave her 5 dollars because I felt embarrassed, but I have no doubt she'd have let me take them all for free.
In the workshop, the crystals were part of a ritual restoring purity/innocence and sacredness to the water of a lake in Central Park, and symbolically to all the earth's water. I couldn't join them for the part where the women walked, single file, and fed their crystals and blessed water to the lake. But as it works out, I'll be offering mine to the Gowanus. Kind of sad and pathetic, the idea that a few ounces of water and a tiny crystal poured into the canal on the new moon will cure Lavender Lake. But not worse I hope than the act of dumping toxic byproducts directly into the water by the gallon.
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