Thanks for the insight! I really appreciate it, always good to hear how other people experience things.
We get a lot of the "What does this do?" questions with people expecting a quick 500 words on the metaphysical properties of...you name it! We have some printed cards and papers made up so people can read them as they browse (at the shows), and our website has a metaphysical glossary that I am woefully behind on. I generally take some reference books with to shows so people can do a bit of their own research. Are you familiar with the Melody "Love is in the Earth" books? Those are a standard around here. We are hoping to add some books for purchase next year, and I've been looking at some offered by the Findhorn Press as likely inclusions.
When we have the time at shows, I like to engage people in a little conversation about their intuitive abilities, since it seems like the people who want a book definition for the crystal are trying to strengthen their intuitive skills on one hand, yet subverting them behind a book definition at the same time. I agree that these abilities are a natural part of our being that we have squelched for a variety of reasons. It is fun to see the same people year after year as they learn to trust themselves and their inner knowing.
Between now and Christmas we'll do more craft shows, we have one big psychic fair the 24th-26th of this month and then it will be predominantly church-sponsored events. When we are in a Christian-influenced setting people talk to me confidentially about their own experiences with intuition and metaphysical topics. I think they don't feel they have an outlet to express these things within their regular social and religious networks, and I am a safe ear for them there. Many of these little "confessions" involve a Native American grandmother who taught them herbal healing, or how to draw sickness out of someone with their hands, but are abilities their church has no framework of acceptance for. We also get about one angry person a year who thinks our presence is disrespectful to God and that our attribution of healing properties to "damn rocks" is blasphemy, but we haven't been driven out with pitchforks so we'll keep going back.
When you move into more rural areas, you move away from mainstream Christianity and into more localized denominations that blend Jesus and the Green Man to various effect. Not so much around here since our part of Iowa has gentle geography, but in more challenging terrain you find people whose ancestors emigrated here from Scotland or Ireland and who still follow linguistic and folk healing practices from there. As with other parts of the world, sometimes the local church can assimilate outside beliefs and sometimes not. I think the overall pattern throughout the US is officially one of religious tolerance as borne out by state and federal court decisions, but when it comes down to the personal level of what you want your neighbors to see, beliefs become standardized in a hurry.
Does the aragonite you are talking about look like a bundle of spikes, like a sea urchin? Aragonite comes in some different forms, the spiky ball of it here would be called "Hedgehog."
Can you go to any quartz mines in the UK? We have some friends with mines in Arkansas, it takes us about 10 hours to drive there and we dig almost all the quartz that we sell ourselves, as far as the natural points and clusters go. The tooled and lab-influenced stones come from different sources. I'm trying to convince my one mine-owning friend with a shop on the other side to come to ebid, think it would be great for her here. She says our economy has really hit the mine owners hard this tourist season and isn't making many sales through the internet either, and so far she has been too stressed to contemplate adding ebid to her activities.
Thanks again and be well!