Aside – Mary C Simmons … Art and Word

Don’t we all love crystals? the bigger the better?

Not always…sometimes the smallest things are of exquisite beauty.

Microcrystalline Quartz..the Wee Ones

Agates and Jasper are both fine example of Microcrystalline Quartz with spectacularly beautiful patterns and color.

Many people are asking …what is the difference between Agates and Jaspers?

Texture, baby…Texture

And what you may ask is ‘texture’?
Patterns of spheres, spots, banding and mineral alignment or layering.

Agates are banded or show some sort of layering, like the one below…and often translucent.
Jaspers are opaque (no light will penetrate the surface) and are generally not banded

Some folks lump both jasper as a variety of agate. Not me, however…

Some agates are not exactly layered and some jaspers are somewhat banded. And some agates and jaspers have coarsely crystalline quartz within their tiny landscapes of micro-crystals.

Like just about all else in Geology and life in general, the boundary is not razor-sharp but fuzzy and indistinct and we scratch or heads asking, “is it agate or is it jasper?”

One must learn to live with ambiguity.

By the way…those little circular textures in Lace Agate and Ocean Jasper are actually 3-dimensional spheres. What we see in the cut stone are cross-sections through the spheres. Overall, this texture is known to geologists as ‘botryoidal’, a term derived from the Greek word “botruoeidēs”, which means “bunch of grapes”.

It’s all Chalcedony...

BUT, chalcedony need not be botryoidal, nor layered or banded. Nor is the botryoidal texture limited to chalcedony (e.g. Malachite, Hematite, etc)

So, where do these delicious chalcedony rocks form? Generally in weathering volcanic (e.g. Ocean Jasper…this article is a MUST! -if only for the drop-dead gorgeous pictures), and sedimentary rocks, whether or not the original rock had a lot of silica.
Occasionally chalcedony is found as a petrifying agent in fossils.

As in Dinosaur Bones…
At left is a “gemstone” dinosaur bone cabochon. In the Beginning, Dino bones were made of the same stuff as our bones—largely calcium. After death and extreme burial in the presence of silica and water, the calcium and other bone minerals are replaced with Chalcedony (the whitish and pinkish areas of the stone).

The image below is generally what a dinosaur bone looks like in a thin (30 micron) sections of a rock under polarized light. See Petrographic Microscope.

The image shows a “highly porous structure, with pores filled with late chalcedony, and the fossil remnants of the bone tissue, where black dots used to host a single bone cell. A larger void on the lower left was filled with fine quartz sand. Width of view: 5.3 mm.
Credit: Bernardo Cesare, Department of Geosciences, University of Padova, Padova, Italy”

**Photomicrograph of Dinosaur Bone, Utah, USA.**

Note: the cabochon of the gemstone dinosaur bone shown above is NOT the same rock as is shown in the photomicrograph, but the two are similar enough to show the chalcedony, regardless of the dino bone it replaced!

Chalcedony, of the Many Colored Flavors

All the agates and jaspers, plus the gemstones Carnelian, Aventurine, Chrysoprase, Onyx, Moss Agate, Dendrite…

Rock on, everyone!

yours, in Quartz
-mary

Late last year on one of the social media sites, I was inspired by this poster—words from the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung which reads:

“I sketched every morning in a notebook a small circular drawing which seemed to correspond to my inner situation at the time”

My inner situation was to start the day so splendidly. In meditation. Drawing meditation — a spiritual practice, centered within my own self, rather than the ravages of life in America in 2018 as reported incessantly by social media, news media, comedy media, bullcrap media…

The Mandala Project

I replace it all with Mandala Media—or perhaps Mary Media, though some would argue my inner being, the being whom I truly serve is probably not named Mary. Do our inner beings have names, I wonder? Names that survive our current incarnations?

No matter. Mary has worked well my entire life, in spite of the still, though thankfully occasional, references to nursery rhymes with gardens and contrariness.

Everyone knows what a mandala is, right? —from the Sanskrit, loosely translated as “circle”?

That’s the short definition, which I would come to find useful…but most of us probably think mandalas are a bit more than ‘just a circle’. We want more from a mandala than that.

Man·da·la — ˈmandələ/
noun: mandala;
-geometric figure of a circle enclosing a square, representing the universe.
-in Psychoanalysis: a symbol in a dream, representing the dreamer’s search for completeness and self-unity.

I see. The Universe and self-unity. And the dreamer is… the one who draws the mandala.

That works.

So I draw a mandala every day — with ink and colored pencil on paper. Free hand, but for the inner and outer circles, which are drawn using a template.

The rest is my hand, my focus, my intention.The images of the mandalas flow to me and through me, while I enjoy the patterns and the colors issuing forth from pen and pencils. Emerging first, hearts and stars and squares of ever-increasing symmetry organized themselves in

symmetrical patterns of triangles and stars. The endless variety of possibilities of color and structure ultimately leads to the energy flows of the universe.

Outside, the flowers bloomed and finally, finally I understood that we are, like the flowers and trees, nourished from below and above— with the gifts of the physical earth, and the invisible flows from above, through the energy of sun, wind and eternal sky. Which gave birth to the quintessential mandala…

Asides

Quartz: the Series – Part 2