Love in Unexpected Places

Rose Quartz surfaces spontaneously in my yard. Recently, I got out of the car  and a piece arrived at my feet, just as I was to take a step. Another day, a lightening-bolt shaped sliver of pale pink stone caught the light and I slipped it into my pocket just as I said “I love you” to my Mom on the phone. Once, while working on a particularly challenging piece of writing , I looked up to see a large chunk had mysteriously appeared in the middle of my back porch. The various sizes and shades of pink stone unearth at odd moments, as if pushed suddenly from the ground by forces that needed me to hear a message, delivered with solidity.

Rose Quartz is the “love stone”. According to my favorite  guide to stone meanings, Love is in the Earth,  Rose Quartz “emits a calming, cooling energy which can work … to gently remove negativity  and reinstate the loving gentle forces of self-love. It provides the message that there is no need for haste in any situation, bringing calmness and clarity to the emotions and restoring the mind to harmony after chaotic or crisis situations”.  While I am never sure how much  I believe about stone-magic, it never hurts to stay open to possibility.  And I cannot ignore the very real fact that Rose Quartz regularly appears in my life where it was not before.

Five years ago today, my boyfriend Neil  became the owner of our home. We received the keys at midnight February 12 and spent the next several hours drinking champagne and demolishing walls.  Or rather, he did.  I was sleeping on the living room floor, exhausted from number thirty-four of the thirty-five radiation treatments I was set to complete the next day.  Neil had decided to buy a house while he was sitting in a lounge chair my hospital room after my cancer surgery.  Exactly two years after we started “officially seeing each other”, we closed on a visually uninspiring rambler  three days before Neil’s 39th birthday, two days before Valentines Day and one day before I was done with cancer for good . 

It seemed a dramatic leap of faith to buy a house and move in together just as I finished up cancer treatment. Neil would deny that  it was like that  — he would say that he’d been looking for years, which was also true, though the timing seems rather suspect to me. Either way, our house has always been a place full of love and hope, and surprising, hidden beauty. Besides a seemingly endless vein Rose Quartz, it came with  thirty-four rose bushes – another ridiculously abundant symbol of love and life. We remodeled immediately after moving in. Every inch of wiring, plumbing, roofing, flooring and every wall and counter was worked on with the unexpectedly generous help of family and friends,  surrounding us in happy memories. We’ve re-planted the original gardens and added trees, digging ourselves deeply into the fabric of our little quarter acre. The past few years seen much laughter, dinner parties, drinking and joy and have been the have been the happiest years of my life.

Maybe this doesn’t seem like much of a unique love story, nothing worthy of a whole blog post. But it was the constant presence of Rose Quartz,  which is good for healing emotional and physical “wounds”, that made me think to write. Its surprising abundance in our yard and our surprising (to me) happiness here, seemed linked. I entered this relationship coming from years of bad situations that made me believe that perhaps I was not meant to be with someone. As an adult I had never lived in one place for more than a year, while Neil is a home-body. We are the proof that opposites attract. And though we have been happy, our relationship has  still been full of the kind of difficulties that, even one at a time, break people apart. We were so newly together when I was diagnosed with cancer that I was certain Neil would leave. I wasn’t even sure I long I would be here. But, here I am, still waking up saying YES to Neil and to life. 

Rose Quartz has pushed into our daily awareness with an abundance that borders on ridiculous. Whether I believe in stone-magic or not, the piles around the yard and in the house have made me pay attention to the symbology of this physical reminder of love. The stones are a message to be kind to myself. To have compassion for my faults and those of others. To be generous in my loving, and to do it will full-bodied presence. To notice small things, appreciate simplicity and know that nothing is worth more than this moment. The many, many times I pick up a stone that has randomly appeared or Neil digs a hole in the yard to find a shovel full of pale pink, remind me that love is not an elusive emotion I must quest for. When I forget, something surprising will show up to remind me that it is under my feet, supporting me all along.

So, as I celebrate all the fabulousness in my life and my many anniversaries this month, I do so with my pockets full of pink rocks. Instead of red hearts and flowers for Valentines Day, maybe you should find a piece of Rose Quartz to hand to someone you care about. I have plenty in my yard to share.

Love Is. We sometimes just need to look down to be reminded.