Why agate?

Like many of us, I’m drawn to the wisdom and guidance provided by the earth and its endlessly treasures. This includes gemstones and crystals and pearls, so luminescent and ethereal. When I knew the phone call needed to be made for Mr. Marbles I instinctively reached for a piece of agate I picked up last summer in Saskatchewan, where I am from and call my true home. It’s a slim rectangular shape with deep amber coloured rings visible amid the stone’s milky grey body. It is impossibly smooth and cool, and provides immediate calm and connectivity. I have, in my time, looked upon agate as a rather pedestrian, run-of-the-mill crystal because it’s so common. 

Like all the stones, it tells a story of how it was created and in doing so holds a mirror up to the past geography of our planet. How marvelous. Agate forms as a result of igneous rock marrying with the silica deposits in groundwater. The colorful bands that give the semi-precious stone its trademark bands are layers of agate deposits that develop on top of each other. Agates are banded types of chalcedony that come in a range of colors including pink, red, brown, white, purple, black, gray and yellow. This palette array comes from the impurities within the groundwater’s composition. Beauty and diversity through impurity, an old and powerful story. 

Why agate now? Agate crystals vibrate on a lower, more gentle frequency. There are many types of agate that provide different healing properties depending on their variety. In general though, agate healing properties are slow and steady. They aren’t as intense as crystals like clear quartz or selenite, but they radiate a soft strength to ground the spirit with a sense of stability. Agate properties connect with the energy of the Earth. They are thought to bring harmony to all aspects of the being, physical, spiritual and emotional. Using agate during times of unbalance, when it feels as if the yin and yang within you are operating out of proportion, can reintroduce an equilibrium to your tempered soul.

My desire for this impure, harmonizing, gentle healer makes perfect sense. Marbles’s demise was a slow burn and I sadly watched him decline until I had the courage to release us both. I need a slow and steady stone to hold, to transmit energies to and from as I move through these early days especially. Slow and steady is a pace not often given much credit, or it’s mentioned in a lofty ‘wild child Instagram’ kind of way, replete with images of beautiful thin tanned women living their best lives with silver rings on every finger and lives that are commercially constructed to lure us into capital’s lair. No. Being slow and steady is the route to ourselves in a real way, the steps required to sit in the feels and the whir of ideas and images upon which most of us hang our lives. It’s so much. Our minds, spirits, and souls need to breathe in and out, and in and out, and in and out. Slow is the way to many things and nature knows that, hence agate- now.