By Mo Davies……..
The Crazy Crone……..
I looked around my workroom the other day and realised that not everyone lugs hundreds of crystals and rocks around with them while moving around Australia and finally travelling to North Cyprus 
five years ago!
Nor did I expect to end up working with crystals when, in 1972, I travelled to Australia on a working holiday. In those days you could fly to Singapore then travel by cruise ship to Australia for the princely sum of £110. In any event, as the economy was in strife in 1973, I decided to stay on for a while and built up a new life and friends in Perth, Western Australia, where I first settled, and ended up staying for 40-plus years.
I was invalided out of the workforce in 1986 when I developed repetitive strain injury and was pretty much crippled by it. A rheumatologist told me I’d never use a keyboard again but that just made me determined to find ways to get better on the basis of “never say never”. I turned to alternative therapies such as reflexology, kinesiology, massage, Reiki, cranio-sacral therapy, trained as a Reiki practitioner and gradually managed to alleviate most of the RSI symptoms. I still need to be careful and when I get a twinge in my arm or shoulder, I know I have to stop and rest, having learned that trying to push through the pain didn’t work, it just gets worse again.
But it wasn’t until I moved to Queensland with my husband, one dog and three cats in 1994 that I came across crystals. I must admit that I had never been impressed with the idea of crystal healing but I came across a lovely herbal practitioner, Yvonne Tait, who helped me recover from a severe infection after I’d broken my leg and ankle in a fall, and also introduced me to the power of colours in our daily life. But it was her daughter, Joy, who introduced me to crystals.
Joy came to Boonah, in south-east Queensland, on a holiday with a collection of crystal necklaces she’d created. She leaned forward, beamed at me as she held up the necklaces, and said: “You understand all these energies, don’t you?” I have to be honest and say I replied yes because I didn’t want to be impolite, but frankly I thought she was barking mad. However, one necklace really drew me – a citrine, which is a very pale yellow quartz – and I was off and running after I’d worn it for a while and began to tune into the energies of the stones.
Yvonne offered to let me sell crystals in her herbal dispensary and she and Joy took me down to a crystal warehouse in Byron Bay, northern New South Wales, which is where I first experienced an enormous pull towards a crystal and couldn’t let go of it – I’ve still got it, by the way. Crystalight, the warehouse, was like a treasure trove with all the crystals it had in stock. I started off with a small number of crystals, which sold fast, started ordering via mail instead of travelling to Crystalight, read heaps about crystals, got familiar with the different stones, and started teaching crystal healing to friends in Boonah.
I found I understood the energies of crystals intuitively which really surprised the heck out of me, as I’d been pretty conventional until my run-in with RSI. I once heard a voice telling me that a crystal was awaiting me at a shop in Ipswich, a suburb of Brisbane, which would cost $20. I went to the shop but couldn’t see anything which drew me. The owner asked if she could help and, when I told her about the voice I’d heard, said: “Come out the back, that’s where I keep crystals for people like you”. I walked through a curtain and immediately saw a round, boring-looking sphere which I knew was the one I was looking for and yes, it cost $20. When I walked out of the shop I look at this glum-looking stone and wondered why I’d been drawn to it. But as I turned it round and round, I could see luminescence in its depths and gorgeous colours of green, blue and gold. It was Labradorite, to me a stone of communication and transformation.
And then I started selling crystals at markets in our local area and further afield at Mt Tamborine in the hinterland behind the Gold Coast. I also travelled further afield to Brisbane and its suburbs and started holding crystal parties, a bit like Tupperware parties, where people could handle various crystals, pick the one or ones they wanted, and paid me at a later date.
In 2002 we returned to the UK to be close to my husband’s mother who was in her early ‘nineties and to re-connect with his children. I had intended to give away working with crystals but then I came across the internet, eBay and crystal sales and, once again, I was drawn into the world of crystals. It was a great extension of my knowledge about crystals as I’d mainly been working with the more common crystals, such as clear quartz, rose quartz, amethyst, fluorite, obsidian, garnets, moonstone, jasper, and so on. In the US EBay particularly I came across rare and – to me – unknown crystals – and I had a grand time buying and learning about so many new forms of crystal I’d never come across before. My husband used to groan when the front door bell rang and it was another delivery of crystals!
I also came across a crystal healing practitioner in the US who had a vast knowledge of crystals, working with crystals and crystal healing. I joined his crystal healing group and learned so much from him for which I’m so grateful. I also taught crystal healing workshops to big and small groups.
And so, when we decided to return to Australia in 2004 after my husband’s mother died, I carted a whole heap more crystals back with us than when I’d arrived in the UK two years’ earlier!
Back in Australia we moved quite a bit – on the wheatbelt south-west of Perth; in Woodenbong in northern New South Wales, in Traralgon, Victoria; and finally in Bowraville on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. I visited mind, body and spirit events, but, best of all, fossicked around rock fairs where you used to find “rock hounds”, people who went mining independently for rocks and crystals, who polished their own rocks and who created their own crystal jewellery. And the big advantage of the rock fairs was that the prices were really low and people were operating on a passion for rocks and crystals rather than on a commercial basis. I used to have a wonderful time discussing crystals and rocks and where people had found them as rock hounds are absolutely passionate about their hobby – or obsession, if you want to call it that!
In 2011, after I’d nearly died of heatstroke and life in Australia was getting hugely expensive, we decided we’d like to move closer to my husband’s kids in the UK and settled on North Cyprus as a halfway point. We’d found in 2002-4 that we couldn’t handle the weather in the UK, so Cyprus made a nice, midway point where we could visit my step-kids in Scotland and England or they could visit us here. So once again my crystals and rocks were packed up and now they fill my workroom and sit out on a round table on the verandah outside my workroom. And yes, I still continue to buy new crystals, rocks and crystal jewellery. And connect people with crystals when they come to visit me and go through my rock and crystal collection. I have held a crystal workshop here, at Vicki Karaca’s Black Olive studio, and am happy to show people my collection and talk about crystals if they want to come and visit me in Alsancak, where I now live.
Do also come and join me at my website click here and Facebook page click here.
