An agate nodule cut open and polished, and the open face is almost entirely crystal. The druzy here is near black, a dense field of tiny sharp points packed edge to edge, and it does not look like much in a dull room. Move a light across it and the whole face turns to glitter, hundreds of separate points firing at slightly different angles, dark and bright at the same time.
A thin white seam runs right across the middle of the face like a watermark, and below the crystal the stone turns to smooth polished agate in soft blue gray, the two halves meeting along a crisp line. The back carries scattered amber and brown mineral spots. The bottom is cut flat. The agate is from Uruguay.
Size: about 3.5 inches tall and about 2.75 inches wide
Weight: 15.8 ounces
One of a kind, exactly the piece in the photos.
Dark druzy is harder to photograph than it is to live with, and this is a piece that rewards the room rather than the camera. Keep it where light moves across it during the day, a windowsill, a shelf near a lamp, the end of a counter you pass, and it will catch at some point in every hour. Set it where the light is flat and even all day and it will sit there looking like a dark stone, which is a waste of what it does.
Agate is the steady one. It is the stone people keep for the long middle of things, the stretch that is not a crisis and not a triumph, when what is needed is to simply keep going at the same pace. Banded agate has long been read as a record of patience, each layer laid down in its own time and none of them hurried, and it is kept for grounding, for steadiness of temper, and for the slow building of confidence that cannot be rushed. The dark ones get read as the protective end of that, kept for holding a boundary rather than opening one, and a face like this that only shows itself in the right light suits that reading well. Many keep a dark piece by a door or a desk, somewhere a line gets drawn.
Because natural minerals are delicate and can be damaged by the stress of shipping, we are unable to accept returns. If your item arrives damaged, please contact us within 48 hours with photos and we will make it right.
