#witch stones
You don’t make enough money to buy the ethical crystals?
Did you know that the rocks outside are, generally speaking, free? You can take them home. Go outside, find a cool rock, take it home.
If there’s a specific kind of rock you’re looking for, for some reason – google free rockhounding sites in your area and plan a trip. This is VERY inexpensive (pretty much, cost of gas to get to the site generally speaking) and a fun day trip. I’ve found some MAD cool rocks out in the middle of the desert. Got a nice, huge, red jasper/hematite/quartz geode cracked in pieces. I found it myself outside. I’ve found some neat calcite pieces. Even some topaz. Horn coral fossils. Found a piece of variscite in a river once. Found some lovely dark aventurine in the gravel where they were about to pave a new road.
You don’t need to be rich or even middle-class to have cool rocks without exploited people dying for your desire to have cool rocks.
Literally just go outside and look at the ground a bit.
Or, y'know, save up and budget for the ethical fancy pre-found ones.
(also also, look into if there’s a gem show near you. There’s almost always at least one guy whose whole booth is shit he dug up himself because he’s just into going out and finding cool rocks. Talk to the vendors and figure out who that guy is, buy stuff from him, and also get the perk of getting to talk to a cool guy who loves to talk about the rocks he found)Seriously, if you LOOK, you will start to notice how many cool rocks there are just everywhere! If you start going on walks, you will absolutely find a rock that has an interesting pattern, shape, or texture. Get that 6-year-old mindset back, and make your own magic!
No really—cool rocks are all over the place.
These are my two “witch stones”. A year ago we moved into this new house with absolutely 0% of the yard done. One of the things we did when installing the yard was spread a few tons of gravel on one side of the house where we planned to park our trailer and my car and eventually put a small tool shed. We picked this river-rock gravel bc we just liked how it looked, and I’ve found all sorts of neat rocks in it.
I found the lighter-colored witch stone first and thought “ooh, neat! A rock with holes in it!” And literally a week later a post came across my dash about witch stones and I was like “holy Hel, I have one of those!”
