The North I Threw Away
On a tiger’s eye ring, a Catholic retreat, and the thing I keep setting down because a borrowed voice said it was not safe to hold.
There is a tiger’s eye ring that started all of this, and I no longer have it.
I was seventeen, maybe nineteen. My first job, the kind that pays you in coins you can almost count in your palm. I was walking home with that little bit of money when I passed a street vendor with a tray of crystal rings, and one of them caught me the way a thing catches you before you have any language for why. Tiger’s eye. Brown and gold and banded like something that had been watching a long time. I bought it.
I did not know I was buying the first stone of a whole life.
The Language of Stones
For a long time after that, crystals were the only subject I trusted myself to speak on. Before astrology. Before shadow work. Before I ever tried to teach anyone about money and failed at it, because that was never the lane the energy actually ran in. I built my first small community around crystals. I gathered four girls and carried my favourite stones and we sat together and it was good. I made groups, I posted, I taught. I grouped the crystals by element and by sign, laid them out like a language I was finally fluent in. I never sold a single one. I only ever wanted people to understand them.
I imported them from America to Kenya, spending money I did not really have, and I have since learned that most of those stones were probably pulled out of Kenyan ground in the first place, shipped away, sold back to me at a markup by the same machine that takes everything from here and returns it wearing a price tag. I paid it anyway. That is how much I wanted to hold them.
And then I went to Sedona.
This was 2017. I had crossed an ocean and I was standing in the middle of red rock that hums if you stand still long enough, and I gathered crystals the way a child gathers shells, greedy and delighted and completely unashamed of wanting them. I brought them home in my bags like treasure. For a few days I was the most myself I had been in a while.
Then I went to a Catholic retreat.
I do not fully know how to explain what happened in me there, except that fear arrived, the specific fear that has a scripture for everything and a warning for anything that glitters outside the sanctioned light. I began to feel that my crystals were dangerous. That loving them was a door I had left open to something I should be afraid of. That to belong to the room I was in, I had to prove I could let them go.
So I threw them out. The jade. The others. I put my own earth in the bin like it was contraband.
The next morning I walked the same path, looking for them. I do not think I even decided to. My body just took me back to where I had abandoned them, the way you return to the place you last had a thing you cannot bear to have lost. They were gone. Of course they were gone. And I stood there feeling a grief that was much larger than a few stones, though I could not have told you then what the real size of it was.
I had thrown away my north, and not for the first time, and not for the last.
The Drifting Pole
The magnetic north of the earth is drifting. It has left where it sat for a long time and it is moving, fast, and a compass does not stop working when the field shifts. It only has to be recalibrated. The old map stops being reliable, and for a while you do not know which way you are facing.
That is what losing the north actually is. Not a pole destroyed, but a direction you can no longer take for granted.
And it feels, in a body, like fear. Like bewilderment. Like standing on a path the morning after, not able to find the thing you threw away, not able to say why you are crying.
The Borrowed Voices
I took a red garnet to the sea as an offering and watched it disappear into the water and I cried on the shore like I had drowned something. I have lost so many stones. Given away, dropped, sacrificed, gone. Early on, before I knew what was what, I lost money to people who lied to me about which stone was which, and I lost more than money, because being lied to about the thing you love teaches you to distrust your own longing. I disbanded the first community when I got tired. I let the groups go quiet. I never built the business, and now I watch the women I taught still running theirs, and something in me asks, too late, whether I should have sold.
The wound is that I kept setting down the thing I loved because some borrowed voice told me it was not safe to hold.
The church. The fear. The quiet verdict that a woman like me should not want something so much, should not build a life on something so unserious, so bright, so unprovable.
Because here is the part I have never resolved, and I am not going to pretend I have. I do not know if they work. I have never heard a crystal speak to me the way some people describe, never had one tell me to charge it a certain way or place it in a certain hand. I have only ever felt them. The yawn that comes from nowhere. The energy that creeps up the arm. The red jasper I kept close through a season when I needed to feel held, because someone had told me it steadied you, and I cannot tell you whether it was the stone or my belief in the stone or the simple animal comfort of carrying something that felt like an anchor. I cannot separate the crystal from my faith in it.
And I have decided, finally, that I do not have to.
The Question
The question was never whether the north is scientifically where the compass says. The question is whether you let yourself be pulled by it.
I threw mine away to belong to a room. And the room did not hold the part of me that loved them. My relationship with the stones had. They were the one thing that did not forget. Some minerals preserve the direction of an ancient field long after the world around them has changed, holding it for millions of years, long after the people who scattered and doubted and changed their minds have dispersed. They keep the old direction even when the north has moved. Even when I have.
The Thread
A reading once told me that one of my grandmothers wore a green stone. I do not know which grandmother, or which stone, or whether it is even true. But something in me leaned toward it like iron leans toward the pole, because it would mean this did not start with a tiger’s eye ring at a market.
It would mean it came down to me.
That the loving of stones is not a hobby I picked up but a thread I was handed, and that when I threw my jade in the bin I was throwing away hers too.
I am not going to end this by telling you I have found my north again, because I am still learning how to stop giving it away. But I know now what it is. It is not out there, in Sedona, in a mine, in a room that will approve of me if I am only austere enough. It is the small steady pull of the thing I have loved since I was a girl with almost no money and one gold-banded ring.
It is in my own hands. It is in the ground under Kenya that they keep taking from. It is in whatever my grandmother wore.
I threw it away once, and walked back the next morning to look for it.
I am still walking back.
🤍
Going Within
What did you love before anyone told you what it meant about you? Where is it now?
Think of a room you wanted to belong to. What did you set down, quietly or dramatically, to be allowed in? Did the room hold you the way the thing you set down had?
Whose voice delivers the verdict when you reach for something bright and unprovable? Name the voice. It is almost never your own.
Is there a thread that may have come down to you, a grandmother’s stone, a parent’s craft, a family gift nobody claimed? What would it mean to pick it back up as an inheritance instead of a hobby?
Take these to a journal or a long walk, and answer honestly rather than impressively.
The Stones and The Thread
The stones and I found our way back to each other. I teach them now at Crystal Clarity Kenya, with discernment: study it, question it, relate to it, decide consciously. And the wound underneath this essay, the borrowed voices and the rooms we shrink for, lives in my books at inkandshadowtales.com.
If you want your reflections to have a home that remembers them, they live there too.
If you don’t want to walk alone, come join me. We shall walk together.
If this essay moved you, share it with someone still throwing away their north.
Or share the publication.
Or simply stay.