An Exchange of Power

Yesterday I went to a party. I talked to a girl I didn’t know for a long time about a painful situation she was going through - a situation I did know about. She was probably in her early 20’s - about the same age as my oldest daughter.

Before I left, I gave her the necklace I was wearing - something small in the grand scheme of things, but very significant to me; something that has given me immeasurable comfort that was passed on to me by a very special lady. It was a large and very old moonstone. A rainbow moonstone. My ‘power stone’, as I called it.

It is nothing new for me to give something like that away; I was on the receiving end of a similar transaction almost twenty years ago that impacted me in such a profound way that I had to keep it going (backstory).

But this was my ‘power stone’. I didn’t have it for very long, and it was something I had an awareness of at all times; its weight around my neck felt as new as the first day I put it on, and I had not taken it off since that day. I would constantly reach up to my neck and cup the stone in my hand. It grounded me. My power stone.

During our conversation, something inside me told me to give it to her. I didn’t know if she’d take it – or even if she’d like it – but I’ve learned to hear and listen to that inner voice. That’s how it works for me.

I’ll be honest: I never thought I’d part with it, and if I ever did I did not expect it to be for a long while because I was so … aware of my awareness of it.

I’ll be honest again: when I heard that inner urging, I questioned it with, “Really?” I was immediately answered that I didn’t need it anymore. Like Dumbo and his feather (I’m giggling at that thought as it just popped into my head. Dumbo. [snicker]);  he didn’t need it to fly, but since he couldn’t trust in his own ability, he needed something tangible to hold onto – to believe in, until he learned to believe in himself.

 -- Damn! Lonestar and the ring of the Schwartz – from Spaceballs! Why couldn’t that have been the example that popped into my head first? I’m talking about jewelry, too! Dumbo. Ha! Dumbass. I guess I still need to be able to laugh at myself a little more.

When I reached up to take it off I knew I was doing the right thing, and when I gave it to her that feeling grew into more certainty. It felt like a transfer of power, in a sense. Her reaction to the gift was the same as mine that day twenty years ago when it started for me. If I had any questions at all whether or not I’d done the right thing – that this would be taken as significantly as I’d meant – they were erased later when I saw her mingling with other party guests and caught sight of her a few times reaching up to her neck and cupping the stone in her hand as I did so many times these past few months.

It wasn’t until I was in my car for the hour-long drive home that I realized the enormity of that event for me. There was one smaller detail that I hadn’t considered: the chain, the chain the stone was hanging on (the stone pendant had been given to me without a chain, and I used my own). Even the chain was special to me (for reasons I don’t need to explain here) – and I never once thought of it when I took it off. Not once. That blew my mind when I realized what else I’d let go of. Without any awareness or thought of it. And I was okay. No, I was more than okay. I think I smiled like an idiot for the entire drive – I felt so good.

I realized more about all of that, too; I was mistaken in my thought of it as a transfer of power. It was not a transfer; it was an exchange. In talking with her (someone unfamiliar to me) about something I’d already experienced, I heard in my own voice how much I’d grown since then. Right from the horse’s mouth. Even though I would have told anyone that I still haven’t been able to get past it. Even though I believed I was still stuck, I heard from my own mouth that I wasn’t – at least not like I’d thought. Whoa!

As a firm believer in the connectedness of all of us, I believe that one of the implications of that is that if you harm another, you are doing harm to yourself; which means the reverse is also true: if you do a service to another, you are also serving yourself. This and that. Both sides of the same coin. When you lift up another, you are lifting up everyone else. Even Jesus said that what you do for someone else you do for him.

This means that if I was able to give her any comfort at all, I was also comforting the part of me that had felt the same way she did, as well as every other person in the same situation – in the realm of the collective consciousness, the spirit connection of all of us.

In that vein, too, I was able to comfort my own daughter in a small way – the words I said to this girl would not have been received so well by my daughter, simply because of the bias most children have towards their parents’ inability to ‘understand’. (As if I never felt that way towards my own parents!) But those words are now 'out there' and she will benefit from the collective.

I'm aware that my neck is bare, but not in the sense of a feeling of something missing. The necklace never felt like a shackle or yoke, either. I don't feel like I've been freed, but I do feel free.

If I ever see this young woman again I would thank her for what she gave to me. I gave her a simple necklace, but she gave me something in return, too.

It was definitely an exchange. Of power.

I had taken the picture of her to show to the woman who gave me the stone. The picture of the two of us was taken by someone else at the party with no plan or design to 'feature' the necklace.