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Small thing that's been helping: a rose quartz in my coat pocket. Whenever my hand finds it, I check whether my jaw is clenched. It usually is. Then it isn't.

Quick care note, since it came up three times at the counter this week: not every stone likes water. Selenite will dull and pit, pyrite can rust, and please never soak malachite or put any stone in water you plan to drink. A night of moonlight on the windowsill suits all of them beautifully.

Quartz, from the engineer's side of the table

Something I find genuinely moving, as a skeptic: there's a tiny sliver of quartz in nearly every cheap watch on earth. Squeeze quartz and it produces a small voltage; apply a voltage and it vibrates at a remarkably steady frequency. That's the piezoelectric effect, and it's why your watch keeps time. I don't believe a quartz point is doing anything energetic when I hold it. But I've started keeping one on my desk anyway. When I'm stuck on a problem, I pick it up, and the weight and the cold and the clean geometry slow me down enough to think. Maybe that's all some people mean. Maybe it isn't. Either way, I'm less dismissive than I was a year ago, and that feels like progress.

One stone every sabbat, twenty-two years

When I was initiated, my High Priestess gave me one piece of advice I've actually kept: at every sabbat, wherever you are, pick up a stone. Not a special one. Whatever's at your feet. Twenty-two years later it's a big glass jar on my altar, mostly hidden by cat hair. Gravel from a festival car park. A slate chip from Wales. A crumb of concrete from the hospital car park, the Samhain I spent in a waiting room. A perfect white pebble from the beach, the year my mother died. Samhain is a week away. I'll add one more, and before that I'll tip the whole jar out on the kitchen table and remember every single one. It's my book of shadows, in stone.

Testing a sunstone in Oregon fog

The sagas mention a sólarsteinn, a sunstone, that could show where the sun was on an overcast day. Plenty of researchers now think it was Iceland spar, clear calcite, which splits light in two and can help you locate the sun through cloud if you know what you're doing. As a blacksmith I love things that actually do something. So I bought a chunk of Iceland spar and took it out on the grayest morning this week. Looked through it at the sky, rotated it slowly until the two faint spots evened out, and marked the direction. Checked it against my phone compass and the sun's position: off by maybe ten degrees. My ancestors crossed the North Atlantic with tools like this. I can barely cross my driveway. Hail to the navigators.

My amethyst was not amethyst

Bought a gorgeous 'amethyst' cluster at a market last spring and brought it to mineralogy lab today because I was proud of it. My lab partner (geology major, very gentle about it) did a quick hardness check and a look under the loupe. Dyed agate. Very purple. Not even slightly amethyst. I was embarrassed for about an hour and then kind of delighted, because now I actually know how to tell. Real quartz scratches glass, amethyst color usually sits in zones rather than pooling in the cracks, and if it looks like grape soda, it probably is. The agate is staying on my windowsill anyway. It didn't lie to me. The seller did.

Feeding Grandmama's lodestones

In my dresser drawer there's a red flannel bag that used to live in my grandmother's. Inside, a pair of lodestones. Lodestone is natural magnetite, a stone that pulls, and in rootwork we keep them for drawing good things close: steady work, good luck, people who mean you well. You feed them. Fridays I take them out, say a few words over them, sprinkle a pinch of magnetic sand so it bristles up on them like little whiskers, and dress them with a drop of oil. Then back into the flannel. Grandmama said a fed stone is a working stone, and a hungry stone gets lazy. I've never once let them get lazy.

A hag stone, asked for

Found my first hag stone on Saturday: a flint pebble with a hole worn clean through it by the water, sitting on a gravel bar like it had been waiting. Old folk wisdom says if you look through one you can see the hidden folk, or at least see things as they really are. I asked before I picked it up. I know how that sounds. But I have a rule about taking from the land: ask, wait, leave something. I left a few oat flakes and a promise to carry out the litter I'd passed on the way (two crisp packets and one very sad flip-flop). I'd rather have one stone from my own river than a bag of something shipped across the world. Local stones know the local weather.

Inventory of my crystal collection

Three river rocks my nephew gave me, one amethyst point, a chunk of something the label called 'aura quartz' that I now have questions about, and a blue glass marble. The marble is staying. It has seniority.

What I won't say at my counter

People are sometimes surprised that, in a crystal shop, I won't tell them a stone will cure anything. I'll tell you what a stone has meant to me, and what it has meant to people across the centuries, and then I'll tell you to see a doctor about your back. I'll also tell you where it came from, if I know, and I'll tell you if I don't. Mining is real work done by real people in some hard places, and 'ethically sourced' isn't a vibe, it's a supply chain. I buy from small miners and local rockhounds wherever I can, and I'm honest when I can't trace something. Stones are beautiful. They don't need us to lie about them.

The kid and the labradorite

There was a boy, maybe thirteen, who came into the shop every Saturday for most of last spring. He'd go straight to the labradorite tray, pick up the same palm stone, a dark one with a flash of peacock blue that only shows at one angle, tilt it around in the window light, put it back, and leave. Week four, I asked if he wanted me to hold it for him. He looked mortified and said no, he was saving up. It was $28. He was mowing lawns. So I didn't hold it. I just moved it to the back of the tray, under a couple of plainer ones, where nobody else would spot it first. Every Saturday he'd dig it out, tilt it, and tuck it back under the others exactly where he'd found it. We never discussed it. It was our arrangement. In June he came in with a sandwich bag of crumpled bills and quarters. Exactly $28, plus the tax he'd worked out on his phone. I'd love to tell you I gave him a discount, but he was so proud of having the exact amount that I took every coin. What I did do was find him a little velvet pouch and tell him what labradorite means to me: the color is always in there, even when you're holding it at the wrong angle and it looks like grey rock. You just have to keep turning it. He came in last week, taller, with a friend, and showed her the stone. Still in the pouch. Still flashing. That's the whole reason I run this place.

Down on the Lizard there's a green-and-red stone called serpentine, mottled like an adder's back, and you'll hardly find it anywhere else in Britain. When it's wet on the beach at Kynance, it glows. I don't take pebbles off the beaches anymore. They're needed where they are, holding back the sea. Instead I bought a little offcut from one of the old turners' workshops, polished on his lathe. It sits on the windowsill by the tide table. When a storm's rolling in, I hold it and watch. Something about a stone that was once the floor of an ancient ocean makes the waves feel less personal.

Lapis for Djehuty, carnelian for Bast (with footnotes)

Updated the shrine stones this week: a small lapis lazuli on Djehuty's side, a carnelian on Bast's. Footnote 1: lapis didn't come from Egypt at all. It was traded all the way from the mountains of Badakhshan, in what's now Afghanistan, which tells you how much it was prized. Some texts describe the gods' hair as made of lapis. Footnote 2: carnelian turns up everywhere in Egyptian jewellery and amulets. Its warm red-orange felt right for Bast, who is fierce and cozy in equal measure, rather like the cat currently asleep on my keyboard. Footnote 3: I paid $14 for both. The pharaohs would weep.

A paperweight for my Saturn return

New desk accessory: a piece of smoky quartz. Not because a chart told me to. I checked four different 'zodiac stone' lists and they disagreed on literally every sign, which as a data analyst I find very funny. I bought it because it's heavy, dark, and a bit cloudy in the middle, which is an accurate summary of being twenty-nine. It sits next to my transit calendar. When I get dramatic about Saturn, I pick it up and remember: Saturn isn't punishing anyone. It's asking what you're building and whether it will hold weight. So does a paperweight, really.

Pebbles that become a boulder

Many shrines in Japan keep a sazare-ishi, a big lump of rock made of small pebbles cemented together over ages. It's named for an old poem about little pebbles slowly growing into a great boulder, with moss covering it. I'd never take a stone from shrine grounds; those belong where they are. But on my last visit home, at the river below my grandmother's village, she pointed at the water and told me to choose one. I picked a small grey pebble and wrapped it in washi. It sits below my kamidana now. Some days it reminds me of patience. Some days it just reminds me of her hand, pointing at the river.