Stones of the Wood phase

10 stones.

Aventurine Opaque to lightly translucent green, sometimes peach, grey or blue, with a soft glitter from flecks of mica scattered through it. Aventurine's name comes from an accident. Venetian glassmakers spilled copper filings into a melt in the seventeenth century and got a glittering stone-like glass they called avventurina, by chance. The mineral was named after the imitation. Tradition took the glitter as a sign of fortune, and made aventurine the stone of the chance you have to take yourself. Put the aventurine in your hand. Say out loud the one thing you want and have not asked for. Then ask for it today.
Bloodstone Opaque dark green chalcedony flecked and spotted with red iron oxide, so that it looks like drops of blood on moss. Some pieces are nearly black-green with only two or three marks. Pliny knew it as heliotropium and reports that the magi claimed it made the bearer invisible, a claim he did not believe. Christian Europe renamed it. The red flecks became the blood that fell on green jasper at the foot of the cross, and carvers cut Passion scenes into it. It has been a soldier's stone and a healer's stone since. Wash it under the cold tap, dry it on a clean towel, and put it in the pocket of whatever you will wear tomorrow.
Charoite Opaque violet in swirled, feathery, fibrous bands, lilac through to deep purple, streaked with white feldspar, orange-brown tinaksite and black aegirine. It has a pearly, almost silky sheen where the fibres catch the light. Charoite comes from one place on earth: the Murun massif on the Chara River in Siberia, described in 1978. Sellers like to say the name means enchanting in Russian; the mineralogists say it is the river. There is no old tradition to draw on. What has grown up around it in forty years is a stone for the person who knows the change is coming and is dragging their heels. Hold it and say out loud the change you have been putting off, with a date attached. Any date. Then write the date down.
Chrysoprase Translucent apple-green to deep green, evenly coloured rather than banded, with a waxy rather than glassy shine. Pliny lists chrysoprasus among the green stones, and medieval Europe prized the Silesian material enough to line chapel walls with it. Its tradition is gentler than emerald's. Where emerald is the long vow, chrysoprase is recovery, and practice gives it to people coming out of a bad year, on the argument that green returns to ground that was burnt. Hold the chrysoprase and name one thing that is better now than it was a year ago. Say it aloud, even if it is small.
Emerald Transparent to translucent deep green, almost always with visible internal fractures and inclusions; the trade calls that internal world the jardin, the garden. Pliny holds that no colour is more pleasing to the eye than the emerald's, and reports that gem-cutters rested their sight on one after fine work. From that comes its whole tradition: the stone of the long look and the patient love. Lapidaries gave it to lovers as a truth-teller, and said that it clouded when a vow was broken. Look at the emerald until your eyes rest. Then look up, name the promise you are still keeping, and go and keep it today.
Green Tourmaline Transparent green, from pale grass through bottle to a dark olive, in three-sided prisms grooved lengthwise like its black sibling. Strongly dichroic: much darker looked at down the length of the crystal than across it. Tourmaline reached Europe in 1703, brought from Ceylon by Dutch traders, so it has no classical lore; the name comes from the Sinhala turamali, a word for mixed-coloured stones. Green and black are the same mineral family, and practice splits them cleanly. Where schorl is a boundary and keeps things out, verdelite is given to increase: the heart, the garden, the thing that is meant to get bigger. Put the green tourmaline in your pocket and spend one uninterrupted hour on the thing you want to grow. Not planning it — doing it.
Peridot Transparent olive to bottle green, always green and never any other colour, with an oily lustre; large stones show facet edges doubled when you look through them Pliny's topazos, mined at first light on an island in the Red Sea, is our peridot, and the medieval lapidaries called the same stone chrysolite, so the name has moved twice. Marbode of Rennes writes that set in gold it drives off the terrors of the night. It comes out of volcanoes and meteorites, and the tradition keeps it for what grows back. Wear it or hold it, and name one thing that is already recovering. Not a hope, but something you can point to. Say it out loud once.
Prehnite Translucent pale yellow-green to apple green, with a soft inner glow and a fibrous grain; often botryoidal, sometimes crowded with black epidote needles Prehnite came into the record too late for Pliny. It was described in 1788 and named for a Dutch colonel who brought a specimen back from the Cape, the first mineral named after a person. Its lore is modern, and honesty requires saying so. The tradition keeps it as the stone of the settled mind: the one held to quiet the noise around a decision before the decision is made. Hold it in a closed hand. Name the decision aloud, once. Then say nothing for a full minute and notice which thought arrives first.
Serpentine Waxy or greasy-lustred green, from pale olive to nearly black, mottled and veined like a snake's back; the finer bowenite is translucent Pliny calls it ophites, the snake stone, for the mottling that runs across it like a skin, and the old lapidaries hung it against venom and headache. Because a serpent sheds and then carries on, the tradition took the stone for whatever is being shed: an old habit, an old post, an old name. It is held for moulting rather than for change in general. Name one habit you are finished with. Say when it ends, giving a date and not the word soon. Write the date where you will see it.
Turquoise Opaque sky-blue through to green, usually webbed or blotched with the brown or black rock it grew in, which dealers call matrix. The blue greens as the stone loses water or takes up oil. Persia mined it at Nishapur and put it on the bridle: turquoise is the horseman's stone, worn against a fall, and held to crack in the rider's place. Boodt wrote in 1609 that it changes colour with its owner's health, which it does, though the cause is oil and water, not omen. Tibet, the Pueblo peoples and the Dine all keep it as a stone of sky and rain. Put it in the bag you travel with and say where you are going and when you intend to be back.