You don't need to own everything to be rich.

Many people nowadays like to think of themselves as collectors. They proudly display their accumulation of whatever has caught their interest and boast of the difficulties of obtaining this or that piece. It isn’t a new phenomenon. In times gone by, several species of flora and fauna were rendered extinct by hobbyists wanting to possess the rarest of the rare with little thought for the impact this might be making on the environment.

Of course, nowadays we are more educated and don’t go chasing after endangered species with anything more lethal than a camera. If people want to collect something that’s rare, they are more likely to opt for something inanimate like gems and crystals. The perceived wisdom is that rocks are inorganic, so no harm can be done by digging them up. Collecting common rocks is considered particularly innocuous. I’m not so sure about that. I’ve been studying the little fellows and I’ve come to some interesting conclusions.The magical energies of the earth are held crystallized in every single rock, every boulder and every pebble. They don’t have to be particularly fancy or valuable to contain power, they just have to be.The virtues and powers of crystals have been widely studied throughout the past few thousand years and it has caused our poor Mother Earth no end of headaches. She has given us all the crystal tools we could ever need in the form of pebbles and rocks – even fabulous gems have been found sitting on the surface waiting to be picked up.

As I write this, I am making a mental inventory of all the stones sitting in my house at the moment. Let me see: six in the fish tank, one in my kitchen window, one in my car to help me concentrate, one in my purse to keep me from overspending, and a triangular granite chip that is exhibiting some fascinating characteristics which I’ll look into later. And that’s it. That’s all the stones I’ve needed at any one time to write whole books on the subject. Of course I have encountered other stones on the way through my investigations, but I didn’t expect them to stay when I no longer needed them. Some are back where they came from, others have found new homes.

It is a fact known to many crystal magicians that stones of all kinds have a habit of getting themselves moved to where they want to be.I have been healing and performing earth magic with the help of stones, crystals and pebbles for at least eighteen years now and in that time I have come to the inescapable conclusion that they really are alive in their own way. Because they are a life form so very different from our own, it can be hard to accept this possibility, but there is scientific evidence to back up my belief. What you believe is up to you. If you want to think of rocks and pebbles – and mountains come to that – as just so many minerals; that’s fine with me. Just respect them.