You Are Glowing with Crystal White Light!

Abstract

You Are Glowing with Crystal White Light! Jenn Shapland (bio) At a bookstore in Santa Fe called The Ark, you can buy a crystal for anything. Heartache? Try some rose quartz. Need clarity? Citrine will manifest it. Self -worth? Rhodonite. Guidance? Hollandite. The shop is filled with books on magick and astrology, organic gardening and witchcraft. It's the closest thing I've ever seen to the Magic Box, Giles's magic shop in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The crystals perch in glass cases organized by type with cards that describe their uses, a curated consortium of physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual voids. When friends come to visit, I bring them to The Ark, and every single one of them finds something that they need. "More than 60 percent of US adults hold at least one 'new age' belief, such as placing faith in astrology or the power of psychics, and 42 percent think spiritual energy can be located in physical objects such as crystals," a Guardian article about the disastrous mining of crystals in Madagascar informs me. The article was trying to discover: whence these crystals? But, looking in the mirror as I idly roll an amethyst (for intuition) across my face, my question remains: whence our faith? We are in a woo Renaissance. New Age ideas and practices, many of which were adopted or flat-out appropriated from thousand-year-old Eastern traditions or Indigenous ceremonies—yoga, crystals, sage smudges, incense, meditation—are a zillion-dollar business in America. Sage smudging has become so popular for cleansing one's space of perceived toxic auras that white sage has been overharvested, making it difficult to access for Indigenous people who have used it for centuries. Crystal mining is destroying the earth and miners' bodies just as coal mining does. Like our faith in supplements, in exercise, in dieting, our faith in woo is scientifically unsound and yet unshakeable. We dabblers and new believers are in the process of colonizing even spiritual practice, even the mystical. A final frontier. The global pandemic only makes our faith stronger, as our awareness of being sick or the potential for getting sick grows. When I say "our" faith, I include myself, drinking the murky herbs my acupuncturist, Kelly, makes me, rubbing green moxa cream into my skin, wearing black tourmaline (to dispel negative energies), placing huge weight on the words of yoga teachers. All of which suggests we are looking to heal ourselves, and we are looking for something to put our faith into, seeking some kind of meaning. Or at least, I am. [End Page 148] After I moved to Santa Fe—and wasn't I drawn here at least in part for the New Age bounty, the healing air, the woo paradise?—I began seeing a therapist named Lara. Her Psychology Today profile lists Enneagram Coaching and something called "Eclectic," and her long, wild gray hair conveyed wisdom, something witchy. When I told her that I wanted to be a writer but couldn't figure out how to make that a career path, she recommended The Artist's Way to me, mentioning that she'd found it helpful in her own life. I was skeptical of Lara, as I am of all therapists at first, and skeptical of the Enneagram, and skeptical of The Artist's Way. I remembered it from working in a bookstore, where it sold regularly and I'd mentally filed it under "not for me" between The Secret and Men Are from Mars. As a writer, it is easy to be skeptical of self-help as a genre. I can smell manipulation on the page. An early chapter of The Artist's Way, the 1992 self-published bestseller by current Santa Fe resident Julia Cameron, discusses the importance of "filling the well." "As artists," she writes, "we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak." After reading just a few pages, I got sick to my stomach. My well felt bone dry. I didn't like admitting it, but I felt totally depleted creatively, and...