As an intuitive I get a lot of information from a lot of places, and it’s presented multiple ways. The knowledge doesn’t just blossom, it bursts into my awareness like a supernova. Sometimes I can make sense of it: an ah-ha that feels so right that chinks that had heretofore been missing, suddenly click into place. Other times I wonder, “What the heck just happened?”

This year my guides nudged me to practice. Intuition isn’t something that just happens, although it used to seem that way. Over time I have learned it is something that can be practiced, like music. While meditating upon this notion I heard: Practice psychometry. Learn to read objects.

Objects? Where should I start? I look around my house. I know the history and value of almost everything, but then my eyes settle on a basket of rocks. Why not?

I have always been a rock collector, picking up specimens, not only as keepsakes from my travels, but also from my yard. Somehow, they become coveted objects. I had never thought much about them, I just collected them, took them home, and put them into baskets.

One day, after nightfall, while walking in my garden, the scant light of a half-moon shone upon a small, kidney-shaped rock. It was smooth, soft to the touch, and as black as the velvet of the sky.

A comfort rock.

I slipped it into my pocket and rubbed it as I walked about. When I went inside, I placed it upon my altar. From time to time, I picked it up to rub its silkiness, then I put it back among the other treasures that remind me of who I am. It’s been there for several years.

For this new practice, my perfect little comfort stone was not my first choice. Another altar stone caught my attention, a chunk of red jasper from Patagonia, Arizona. 

I held it in my hands, cradled between my palms. First, the stone felt cold, then colder still. Odd. The more I held it, the colder it got.

“Follow the cold,” I told myself. “Follow the cold.”

In my mind’s eye a migration of people passes, wind howls. Darkness, ice, snow blow against them. They shuffle on, heads down, dressed in fur. 

Profound cold. Ice-aged people in an ice-aged world.

Excited, I practiced for several days. I was learning to let go of preconceived notions. It was an important lesson because often intuition is skewed by personal ideas or desires. 

On the fourth day, feeling as if I was learning how to read these rocks, and to let go of what I expected to learn about them, I picked up my comfort stone.

The lesson of preconceived notions didn’t stop my monkey mind forming them. “It is most likely black basalt, washed and tumbled smooth from a creek bed. Where did it come from? Somewhere atop the Sierra Nevada.”

I nestled it between my palms. Immediately I saw a tumbling washing machine. 

“Well, that can’t be right.”

I focused on the feel of the rock as I had been doing, expecting this one, as had all the others, to be cold and either remain cold or get colder. 

Not so. 

There is heat. And the more I held it the hotter it became. It became so hot I was compelled to let go, and when I picked it up, I placed it against my cheek. It was as if a tiny furnace burned inside it.

I followed the heat. 

Suddenly, there was the washer again. 

What?

Ahh! Then it came to me. This tiny rock was tumbled in an industrial rock polisher! It was sold as gravel, “polished” to resemble river rock and used as a blanket to line decorative waterways or patios. In my yard, it lined a drainage ditch. Before that, it knew only pressurized heat, not volcanic, pressurized. Pressurized heat seemed very important to this reading.

I pressed the lingering warmth against my cheek, cherishing it, and then set the tiny, black rock onto my altar. 

How surprising. 

As I left my bedroom, a notion hit me. Is it possible that some of the major psychic events I experience come from the very rocks I stand upon? How much do rocks know?