A Hole Lot of Magic

Today’s KIOS blogathon prompt is My First…

My first holey stone came to me under magical conditions. 

I was in one of those threshold places.  In my late twenties, on the cusp of having ended a long-term relationship and feeling the freedom of that but also feeling totally at loose ends.  My dream practice and my spiritual practice felt like the most important things to me, and yet I felt unmoored.  I needed some kind of direction.  Sometime earlier I had discovered a book, one of those special life-changing books.  It was Patricia Garfield’s Pathway to Ecstasy – the Way of the Dream Mandala.  While she later developed a reputation as a dream expert, this I believe was her first book, and there was a lovely particularly personal tone to it, with drawings and excerpts from her dream journals; a much more personal journey book than a professional account. But what really hooked me was it was really a discussion of lucid dreaming. I had been lucid dreaming (a dream where one is aware that one is dreaming) since I was a child, and yet I had never had a name for it.  No one else I talked to about it knew what I was talking about and I felt oddly alone with it.  So discovering this book was a gift in itself.  I can’t tell you how excited I was to know I wasn’t alone – that this was something other people were experiencing and the dream community was studying. I felt like I had been given a huge gift of acceptance.

One of the things she mentioned in her book was a holey stone, used in some cultures as dreaming stones, hung above ones bed.  I had one of those delicious tingles of recognition and I couldn’t get it out of mind.  I talked to everyone I knew – did they have a holey stone?  Did they know where I could find one?  And no one did.  It was very discouraging.

And then came the opportunity to take a trip to the west coast.  A friend was getting married in Yosemite and I had the idea of a road trip down the Pacific coast’s Highway 1.  I knew this was my opportunity to find my own holey stone – I could literally hear it calling to me.  And so I set the intention that I would find it and that the entire trip would be magical and filled with deep meaning and goddess connections.

And it was.  The second day, walking along a deserted beach in California, I found it.  Right there, lying out in the open as though it had been placed as the most wondrous of presents just for me to find.   It wasn’t even obvious at first that it was a holey stone.  It was just jaw-dropping amazing – a stone filled with shells leaving sacred spiral markings.  It was an exciting find, but when I saw it was also a holey stone, I could hardly believe it. 

My first holey stone. 

Many more have found their way to me since then, and they’re all precious to me.  But none is more magical than my first.

Holey stones are known by many names including Hag stone, Fairy stone, Odin’s stone, Witches Amulet, and held important by many cultures.  For me they’re definitely Goddess Stones, clearly connected to the divine feminine.  But they are also liminal stones – representing a gateway/threshold to other states and dimensions. A lot of my work is liminal and holey stones feel like a perfect reminder of that.

So tell me – do you have any holey stones?  Have a particular type of stone that’s your favorite?  Are you a lucid dreamer?  Do tell – you know I love to hear.