Stone Ally as Healer

My hospital room was up on the sixth floor and I had a small window that showed the brick wall of a building across the way. I went weeks without seeing nature and I went nuts. Even though I knew that beneath the floor, beneath the hospital, beneath the basements, there was earth. But I felt so disconnected. My family brought me two precious things: a piece of birch limb and a flourite crystal.

I'm a bit of a stone geek and rock nerd and I can feel the different energy between different varieties of crystals and minerals. I consider them to be great allies in negotiating the flow of energy. Flourite happens to have enormous healing properties.

When I was scared, or when they changed my dressings, or when I meditated, I often held my flourite to my chest. Instead of trying to reach down beneath the hospital with my thoughts, I held the crystal to my body. It was always cool to the touch, and the way the crystal cleaved inside, and caught the light, it helped me go deeper and deeper into my meditation, into growing new skin cells and helping the grafts knit together.

And it soothed me. When I cried I held it to my forehead. It took the feverish flush from me.

The large stone was colored like a spring day against the gloomy winter afternoons. The sun is coming, it sang. It was born from somewhere in the earth, compressed and colored by fire. By fire. I held onto that. And we healed together.

Looking Back: Unexplainable Things Have a Purpose

“If the wonder’s gone when the truth is known

there never really was any wonder.”

~ from the television show House

Unexplainable things have a purpose. It’s something I believe. It’s not the same thing as “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe that is true, as it insinuates that something somewhere is orchestrating the event. In the natural world, things just are and what matters is how we take them. I believe that sometimes the purpose of unexplainable things is just to exist and/or happen, in order to serve as a moment against which we respond and reveal how we react to things unknown. They can be teachable moments, reflecting our vulnerabilities and levels of openness. We cannot control what happens to us all the time. The only control we have is how we respond to it.

Some people think of death as the ultimate unexplainable thing. We try to make sense of it in order to find some solid ground to stand on when we face it but we also meet the stories of those who have come back from death with disbelief and skepticism. We want to know but we want to know and have difficulty accepting an outside voice as truth, assuring that we can never truly have an answer.

Unexplainable things happen but even calling them that is a misnomer. It’s not that they can’t be explained. It’s more that we lack the understanding or language to put the experience into words that make sense. Maybe because we try to put into words something our intuitive bodies just know. We have multiple senses and each of these have their own language and way of responding to and translating the world around us. We spend so much time trying to figure out if what happened to us could have happened to us, that we lose sight of the fact the experience happened at all. Some of these teachable moments are not as grandiose as death. They can be small events that evoke a larger change within us.

In the summer of ’97 on a Smoky Mountain peak, I wandered away from my house at dusk, away from the chaos of people, towards the small creek that ran along the property. I was having one of those nights of feeling like there was no place to be alone in a house twenty-one people lived in and I was looking for a little inner quiet. I must have sat on the bank of the creek, listening to the gurgling, rippling and singing of the water off the stones for an hour, unmoving, just being.

I almost didn’t notice the shadow that flew over me and by the time I reacted the creature was sitting on a low branch above the creek five feet in front of me. It was the first memory I have of seeing an owl in the wild. It was by the far the largest bird I have ever seen in nature. She appeared mostly white, with bits of grey tufted here and there. She wasn’t moving and her eyes took me in. They were large and round and the color of dandelions. She might have had horns, and in some recollections earlier on I was more sure- before my brain started telling me what could or couldn’t be possible.

I held my breath as the owl turned its head around. For the moment that we sat there, the smell of the air seemed to shift, filling with a muskier scent of moldy earth and grated wood bark. I exhaled and the owl spread its wings out and flew silently, not even a whisper, over my head. I fell backwards as it passed, watching it glide overhead, in fearful intimidation. I remember her wing span was almost as wide as I am tall.

In that moment, I felt like I had glimpsed an unaltered state of the natural world. It woke something in me and my eyes were open, seeing the wild in tandem with the modern. For years I studied every kind of owl looking for the scientific name of the one I saw. No picture ever fit the creature I saw.

One day I asked myself, if someone told me that the owl I saw was impossible in nature, would I disbelieve the experience? The answer was no. Even though I couldn’t find the correct scientific answer, my nose remembered its smell. My skin remembered the rush and blur of air as the owl swooped in. My eyes remember with artistic grandeur the unfurling of those wings. And my ears recall the kind of silence that accompanies the presence of a predator in nature. I chose to embrace the truth that my interaction with this magnificent creature woke a connection in me and served as the catalyst for the spiritual path I have taken. Knowing the facts and the science about that moment would not diminish the wonder and magic of the experience, and it shouldn’t.

[This article was originally published February 23, 2011]

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art

and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder,

no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-Albert Einstein

The Magic of Petrified Wood

Petrified birch from the Blue Forest, Wyoming.

In my spiritual life, to better connect to the natural world around me, I use allies as focusing tools, like animals, plants, and stones. I love trees, and feel a strong affinity with them. They have taught me to slow down, to stand and be present in the moment, to breathe in seasons and touch stillness. For this same reason, one of my favorite stones to work with is petrified wood. I use a lot of fossils, the petrified remains of organics that lived millions of years ago. I call them earth bones. They are the ancestral stones I hold when I meditate backwards through my family lines.

Almost as magical as the rock itself, is the process it undergoes to become stone. The word petro is Greek for “rock/stone.” When something petrifies, it literally becomes stone in a process called permineralization, where organic material is replaced over time with minerals, mostly silicates. Many fossils form as compressions or impressions, but petrified wood uniquely forms as a three-dimensional representation of the original, preserving detail at the microscopic level. To feel the weight of the minerals in your hand and the coolness of the stone while your eyes perceive grainy bark… it is a wonder of the natural world.

Wood becomes preserved when it is buried under sediment, where a lack of oxygen stops aerobic decomposition. Then, water rich in minerals flows through the sediment, where they deposit in the plant cells. Permineralization begins when silica from the mineral-laden water permeates the wood. Next, this solution penetrates the pores of the cell walls. Then the cell walls, cellulose, begin to dissolve while, elsewhere in the trunk, the minerals begin to build up, preserving the wooden frame. The last to decay is the inner lignin of the tree. Afterwards, silica deposits itself in any spaces in between the cells, until it finally penetrates the cell lumina, the cavity within the walls of the plant cell. It might fill these voids with chalcedony, agate, quartz, calcite, pyrite, or opal. Finally, lithification occurs, which is the process where sediment compresses under pressure, into rock, as water loss continues to occur. The initial silica is amorphous, which is unstable. Over millions of years, due to more extensive polymerization and water loss, the silica transforms into a more stable crystalline structure, like opal or quartz.

Cellulose, hemicelluloses, and lignin account for 95% of the dry weight of live wood. After permineralization, 90% of the weight of the fossil is silica, showing that very little, if any, of the original material remains [according to Leo & Barghoorn (1976), Sigleo (1978), and Mustoe(2008)]. Permineralization is one of the most accurate modes of fossil preservation. Because different layers of the wood decay and fill in with silicates at differing rates, it preserves the individual parts of the tree, though accuracy varies between specimens. Some are “sugary,” where the cell detail is blurred. Others show the tree rings intact, and still more are comprised of such a fine grain of silica, that the histology of the original tree can be studied satisfactorily.

Believe it or not, that bark is pure stone!

Some specimens of petrified wood, when uncovered, are pure silicate/quartz white, though, over time the sun will darken it. Other minerals add to the beautiful colors of the petrified wood. Carbon colors the specimen black. Cobalt and chromium both add hues of green and blue. Manganese tinges the stone with pink and orange, while manganese oxides color it in yellow and black. Iron oxides color it with red, brown, and yellow.

Petrified wood is a common fossil, but the conditions needed to create it are specific. Temperatures over 212 degrees Fahrenheit will break the wood down before the process can occur and excessive pressures will deform the organic tissues. And not only does it need mineral-rich water but, chemically, wood breaks down when the water’s pH value is below 4.5 and above 7, so the window for a perfect environment is still precise.

They are treasure from the earth, gifts in their assurance as to the cyclical nature of life, and the knowledge that life will out in the end. I use them as touchstones. Their process of transformation traverses so many millions of years that I use them to connect to the past, as if I can take a shortcut and touch any point of time in their linear history. When you come across petrified wood, take a moment to touch it and connect into it. Touch the energy of the spirit of the tree it was once a part of and be reminded of the larger, universal web we are all a part of.

Facts and Folklore

·         Most of the petrified trees have been given the name Araucarioxylon arizonicum. 

·         Petrified wood is found on every continent except for Antarctica.

·         There are petrified trees more than 10 feet in diameter and 100 feet long at the Petrified Forest National Monument, Santa Cruz Province, Argentine Patagonia.

·         The stone of Alberta, Canada is petrified wood.

·         The Chinese government has cracked down on the collecting of this material.

·         The Museum of Natural History in Chemnitz, Germany has specimens that date back to their discovery in 1737.

·         The Puyango Petrified Forest in Ecuador has one of the largest collections in the world.

·         Egypt declared their petrified forests to be national protectorates.

·         The largest forest can be found in the Petrified Forest of Lesvos, on Lesbos, Greece, covering 93 miles. Upright trunks with roots intact can be found there. Some trunks measure up to 72 feet in length.

·         In the Great Sand Sea of Libya, pieces of petrified trunks and branches are littered over hundreds of square miles, along with Stone Age artifacts.

·         At low tide along the coast of Wales and England, submerged petrified forests become visible.

·         Seven species of tree have been identified through petrified wood.

·         Petrified wood is often used in lapidary work, cut into cabochons for jewelry and slabs for table tops and counters.

·         The oldest known species of petrified wood can be found near Gilboa, New York, dating to the Devonian period, over 358 million years old.

·         The stone in the National park in Arizona are of the Triassic Period, over 160 million years old.

·         Petrified wood is associated in metaphysical worlds with the astrological sign Leo and the Base Chakra.

·         Petrified wood and dinosaur bones are the best-known specimens of permineralized fossils.

·         Petrified wood is found in large numbers in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Greece, Indonesia, India, Israel, Libya, Namibia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.

·         In the United States, Petrified Forests and Parks can be found in abundance: the Gilboa Fossil Forest in New York; the Petrified Forest in Mississippi; the park in Lemmon, South Dakota; Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota; the Petrified Springs in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Yellowstone Petrified Forest and Gallatin Petrified Forest in Yellowstone, Wyoming; the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado; the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, Wanapum State Park in Washington; the forest in Calistoga, California; the National Park in Holbrook, Arizona; the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park in Utah.