I currently have 360 pieces of Elmwood on my dining table, which is a wild sentence to write and an even wilder thing to be real. I didn’t plan to fill my home with more Elmwood than ever before during Aries season, a retrograde, a solar eclipse, but you know how it goes with Elmwood. Not going— and not going all in when I did — was not an option. The mine isn’t closing, it’s closed, at the mercy of Zinc’s ever-fluctuating prices. Since November, no new material has come out and my most trusted sources do not anticipate a reopening for at least five years, if ever.

I don’t know if this much Elmwood on my dining table will ever happen again, and I don’t know what to make of that. Watching previous Elmwood live sales is to watch Everyday Magic’s evolution, our departures and arrivals, the best of times and the worst of times. It’s so intimate, so personal it’s almost embarrassing. Elmwood has seen us through years, across state lines, at the crossroads, in the Dark Night of the Soul, and most recently, she finally brought me home to Tennessee.

I shopped with two vendors, both of whom primarily deal in Elmwood. The vibe was the funeral of a non-tragic death. They lived a good and full life, we mused, but what will our lives look like without them? The talk of possible reopening felt like the denial phase of grief.

I don’t know if this will ever happen again. What does five years without Elmwood look like? Collectors are certain to pull from their coffers, treasures hoarded behind glass in Midwestern basements that appreciated better than the stock market emerging for a big payday. But these pieces will not be accessible, we will not be able to offer them by the hundreds at every price point.

A couple days after I unpacked the Elmwood I sourced in Tennessee, the earth shook underneath me. A 4.8 magnitude earthquake knocked the crucifix off my wall in the middle of a client reading, but not a single of the hundreds of tiny fragile pieces of Elmwood situated at the very edge of my dining table moved at all. I’ve lost my phone in my house twice this week for hours at a time, only to be found lurking suspiciously around the Elmwood table. Three people have clocked dozens of hours over this material that is wreaking havoc in my home.

So what the fuck is my problem, you ask? Why am I so obsessed with this rare, expensive, existentially disruptive material?

I believe integrating the lessons of Elmwood is the fastest path to the best outcome. It’s lightning in a bottle when that is the required ingredient. A magician is only as good as their tools, and not only is this crystal the most powerful tool for expedited manifestation I’ve ever worked with, it’s just so intensely… magical. You do not even need to hold it in your hands to feel its effect in the room. It unlocked a deeper layer of belief in magic in me. It’s a game-changer. It’s been a game-changer in my life, in my business, in the hands of witches all over the world who have agreed to be dragon keepers, who also agree lightning in a bottle is a required ingredient.

The fastest path to the best outcome will invariably, expeditiously zap away all lesser paths and outcomes, a dimensional shift of sorts, and this is where Elmwood is famously jarring. While disruptive and sometimes destructive, Elmwood is not imprecise. It contains within it the exacting lighting strikes of The Tower, a catastrophic force of liberation that has brought me to my knees several times this week alone.

As a former skeptic, it takes a lot for me to wax long and sentimental about magic rocks, but here I am, so in love with Elmwood, so indebted to who its made me and Everyday Magic, so devastated by prospect that this may never happen again that I find myself unable to say farewell, saying instead —

I think the mine will reopen in 5 years,
Bakara


here’s some channeled writing I did in Tennessee about Elmwood!

remelding, reconfiguration, reconstruction, reconstitution, to be reanimated by something else

the spirit of the mines
the spirit of the caves
the spirit of the old earth
earths memory, what she misses
those here before us
those who loved her better
earth’s grief
for us

memory churns in the soil
in the mines, in the caves, in the old earth
nature’s demand for justice
can only be obeyed

before the neutrality comes the duality
when balance through extremes is the only medicine
without extremes, balance loses necessity and contrast
white hot and ice cold mixed is tepid

there is a place for you here
among the old earth, among the stars.
here, you become a part of what earth will miss.
part of what holds the earth rather than part of what earth holds.
part of what gives life rather than what takes it.

from below we kept the earth’s mycelial records
this is where we came from, heaven — but heaven was never safe for us
it did not occur to us that we would be found
or that it would feel like war

the non-gentle still deserve gentleness if being gentle is not in their nature
to love is to understand the beloved’s nature and show gentleness all the same
to love is to the accept the responsibility of learning how to be gentle

the earth above learns love
they didn’t know it would feel like war

like everything else that could ever happen
will happen before
must happen before
it’s reached

from here, only that which exalts you may pass your threshold
it means little of us become dust, or to make dust of little

calcite
i know sharp edges
pain and its consequences
what happens under fire
under impossible conditions
but i too know how to withstand these things

fluorite
i am the instanding, infinite container
refracting the stellar beam into a million iterations of light
diffusing its potency that it might be everywhere
i turn lightning into rainbows

sphalerite
i am the conductor.
frequencies pass through me with ease
becoming more harmonious along the way
i anchor opposites into singularity
i am the earth’s blood, heavy in your palm

dolomite
i am the salve
the soft bedrock
called forth by trauma
the medic rushing in after war
healing the earths broken plates
putting her back together