“Well they’re happy” Steve explained. “Happy”, I inquired with raised eyebrows.                        “Yes, extraction is an important part in the vitality of a crystal. If you’ve used brutal                      means to obtain your crystal, it is then stained by how you’ve handled it.

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Crystals are the bones of the earth, and in a sense, the presence of the earth as well.”                 “Quite ironic that you would say that”, I said. “This apatite in front of you could in                    another form be bones. Its component elements of phosphorus and calcite are an                    important structural element of bone and rising to the surface in superheated calcite,                          it was derived by way of leaching from the underlying Glamorgan dolostones. You could say that these apatites in front of us are largely comprised of bones and shells and other remnants of ancient life – full circle I suppose, with once-living structures coming back as part of our crystals”.

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Still, I’m struggling with “happy”. “Let me explain it another way”, my purple garbed colleague explained. These crystals that you are finding on your claim are special in that I feel great energy from them, but only in the perfect pieces. Break a tip off and you’ve got nothing. The energy is gone. Its like a battery that you’ve drained. When I say happy I mean that the crystal is undamaged and in its natural state. Disrespect would be smashing the crystal from the setting in which it has lain for these many millions of years. A crystal that’s been treated as nothing more than a commodity, extracted by unhappy people who are poorly paid and treated with heat or chemicals, is a product of how its been delivered. Some crystals are like children who begin life with abusive parents; they’re not functioning as they should be. They’ll never reach their full potential. Sadly those children grow stunted in their minds and repeat the cycle with their offspring.

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“Well we certainly celebrate new arrivals with good will” I tell him. “We are excited by each find as first and foremost we love crystals for what they are. Every specimen is lain carefully under cloth so it can adjust to surface temperatures without cracking.”

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“Dynamite, jackhammers and earth movers set a certain tone with crystals. When they’re exposed to reckless extraction without consideration of anything but gathering as many together for money as possible, the spiritual connection has been stripped. Think of how indigenous people see the land and then compare their world vision to a child who has grown up in poverty (both of the mind and body) in the inner city. Which of the two can better express the meaning of tranquility? Is it possible for them to obtain a level of spirituality? I see crystals as living beings with a life force with which we can respectfully interact and benefit. Empathy opens the mind to what we have in front of us and acceptance of the crystals possibilities means we as people can live our lives in an entirely more sensitive and meaningful way.”

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“Ah”, I say in an attempt to fully understand Steve’s way of seeing things. Spirituality according to ‘Maslow’s ranking of hierarchical needs’ puts spirituality as the final achievement of a successful person’s life. To truly believe in something greater all other physical and social requirements need already to have already been met. At the most raw and basic level a person needs only to survive, to breathe, to eat and live to see another day. Having those basics, security to know that you will have enough food to last the winter becomes an issue, and being comfortable there your ego surfaces and a person seeks to attain social recognition. On and on it goes with one’s development until there is the wish to touch the greater good. Some believe in this god or that. Some argue about the suitability of science in face of such beliefs and others focus on morality or the lack of it. Crystals seem to be touching our lives as a path to spirituality for many. We understand that spirituality and science can fit together with an open mind.

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There appears to be no exact tome of religion around crystals, but there is plenty of opinion and I suppose in working with our clientele we need to take certain measures with how we handle things. Looking at it from a distance I can see that the modification is not all that great, we already hold the belief in respect for nature and the idea of treating others as we would wish to be treated ourselves. We may not have the empathy to see things as Steve does, but we are open minded enough to have little problem with understanding that eventually the two divergent views will probably come together. We can’t tell you which crystal is right for you, but again, as Steve says, your crystals will “Call out to you; you’ll know they are right when you see them”.

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“So there are bad crystals like bad people?” “Oh yeah, there are certainly some of those. They seldom start out bad, but abusive handling can deaden or taint them.” So how do we identify bad crystals?” “You can’t always tell the good from the bad at a glance, but imagine how they’ve reached us.” Shiny, colorful, an exotic location from which they’ve come … Do you suppose that anything other than maximizing the bottom line was the vehicle for getting them into your hands? Does this place from whence they came have a good track record for human rights? Think of the Congo, children extracting coltan (an ore of tantalum and niobium) for our cell phones. I can’t imagine a healthy aura around a sack of coltan as it’s carried through the jungle and loaded onto planes in Goma. Rebel warlords control the coltan trade at its source. Abused and brutalized people are the ones who mine and transport.” What goes on there is a nasty vibe and similar things can come of healing crystals that come to you through an immoral channel.

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Think of emeralds, they are indeed beautiful and further enhanced by their inclusions or “jardin” as it is sometimes referred to. Merchants are eager to sell the belief of their quality of facilitating marital bliss, but there is also the rumor of their attracting bad luck. With the vast majority of emeralds coming from one of just a very few Columbian mines, and knowing the history and violence that went on there I’d question the supposed good fortune that an emerald brings. Off the coast of Florida the Spanish treasure fleet went down some 400 years ago in a vicious storm. The ships were loaded with gold and silver and emeralds. Thousands of indigenous slaves mined the treasure and those stones could well still carry the vibe of the place from which they’d come. Workers were locked in the mines until they produced the required crystals to buy their freedom and failure to do this had them imprisoned forever.

My conversation with Steve and Billy in their Belleville shop had me thinking. Our business model clearly needed to diverge from the usual. Thus far we were headed down what we believed was the right track. Our crystals are found in the earth, dirt and humus of a forest floor. There are extensive fissures in certain places and in those fissures, buried deeply over time we find our treasure – arithmetic mineral flowers, freed by erosion from their encompassing calcite and held softly in the detritus of millennia.

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This calcite that held our earth crystals came from deep down in the roots of ancient mountains. There in the heat, layers of dolostone were leached of their mineral content by super-heated fluids. Rising up along vents and dykes to touch the surface, crystals formed in heated calcite along its edges. The majority of material, metals, silicates and trace elements that formed our crystals came from the surrounding country rock; in our claim it is mainly gneiss and mica schist. Heat dissolved what was around the fissures and the rock then reformed as crystals as the fluid cooled. It’s a natural process that took place over a hundred million years. We lift shiny black prisms of fluor-richterite from the earth and alternately stubbly grey columns of amphibole of whose many varieties will boggle the mind. What we have comes from deep down and much of it has been formed as a mineral from the now fossilized building blocks of what was once living. The elements have been recycled.

Below: Huge feldspar crystal in a fissure – we reburied it as we did not have the needed tools to extract it.

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Recognizing the delicacy of our crystals (both physically and metaphysically) we typically mine by hand. Shovels open the top of a fissure and as we then dig deeper we transition to hand extraction. It’s seldom that a chisel or hammer will touch our product, and if it does we’ll tell you. Most stable in the deeper earth we guard our finds from excess sun or exposure. Failure to protect them can cause the rock to shatter.

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Other crystals of different species are frequently chipped from pegmatites, they are often just terminated at one end and are frequently scarred by their extraction. It is only in the core of a pegmatite that you will find free reaching crystals; everything else is sandwiched along the fringes or in a tightly packed matrix. Often we find our crystals in matrix, we try to leave them that way and as Steve had told us, a matrix such as we typically have has an energy that’s quite unique to itself. A combination of crystals all bound together could be approximated to a community of people and their collective wisdom or support.

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Because our crystals formed in a molten fluid and were then liberated from their surrounding rock by its erosion they are indeed a very special thing. Most of what we find has thus dropped from the rock without persuasion. Unattached and having grown without confinement to the perfect euhedral specimens the unit cell defined their unimpeded growth. Crystals have a form that is unique to each crystal species and if you’re fortunate your specimen is capped with a dome, a pyramid or pinacoid. What’s left of the formative elements in a vein-dyke or a pegmatite is finally scooped up in the structure of a rare and precious euxenite crystal. It’s especially fortuitous when we find a marvel such as that.

Exposed for the first time in 100 million years a discovery is lifted sky-ward as though in offering to the gods. Sunlight glints through golden-green apatite, a natural marvel of reputed properties encapsulating neodymium, praseodymium and phosphorus. Steve says they’re calming. Holding a large apatite to my solar plexus as instructed I believe I see what he means. I feel my heart rate slow and whether it is his suggestion or the power of what I am holding, I know that there is something at play. Put those elements of change aside and what you have is simply a crystal into which you can gaze and marvel, light scintillating from its many internal faces.

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It is typically in the earthy hues of green, brown and black that we find our earth crystals and in select fissures that signal their riches to us by way of subtle geological and geographical clues. Our crystals are most typically found loose and in calcium vein-dyke fields. They are protected by vegetative camouflage and armies of flies and mosquitoes. Fortunately we believe that our particular claim is one of the most impressive such locations that’s known to exist and it’s crystals as formed and lain in the soil are clearly ‘Earth Crystals’. We had visited Steve at his shop that day to develop a better understanding of that which we could not see. We do not always know exactly what each of the crystals that we find is, but as Steve certifies, a lot of what we obtain carries a powerful metaphysical presence. We will endeavor to keep it that way. I believe respect for what we are doing is key.

 

“Is a crystal that you'd find powerful one that I’d find powerful”, I ask? “The stone must speak to you,” we are told. “It always carries the power, but just like people, we are better suited to working with some than with others.”

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Dark Star Crystal Mines offers you the best of what can be found in Ontario and in time we hope to facilitate your own personal explorations. What more significant crystal for your healing, meditation and metaphysical practices than one found by you and lifted to your bosom by you and your hands alone?