Spirit Matters is not primarily a rock store. Its products, which range from jewelry to books on feminism to statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe, revolve around spiritual intimacy—with the self, the earth, the divine. But last Saturday, visitors from around the region crowded in for the opening of the store’s “Crystal Cavern” show. For the past four years, the store has held biannual shows of rocks, crystals and stones. Owner Nonnie Welch and employee Kelly Driscoll hand-pick most of the wares from all over the world. “You’ll not see anything like it anywhere else,” Kathy Callaway, of Woodacre, said. “You come away altered. There’s a real sense of reverence.” People are attracted to crystals for a variety of reasons, Ms. Welch said: “Some people experience it on a very physical level: there’s a body knowing. For some people it’s visual, for some it’s energetic, for some it’s geologic.” Suzi Goldmacher, who was visiting from Oakland on the show’s opening day, said she tries “to touch [a crystal] every day. The show feels very emotional, very healing. I almost walked out and then thought, ‘No, it’s pulling me back in.’” Other customers come in for a particular reason, such as advice from a therapist to get black tourmaline, which has long been associated with protection. Some customers this week walked around the small space dreamily until their eye was caught by a colorful quartz. “It’s really magic,” one young visitor breathed near a collection of amethysts. Ms. Welch deals personally with all of her vendors, scouting at retail and wholesale rock shows. When possible, she works directly with miners and she looks out especially for women-owned businesses. “A lot of it is on my human-to-human, heart-to-heart, hand-to-hand relations, and my sensing, ‘Is this somebody I want to do business with?’” she said. One of her favorite venders is a family from Madagascar. “I just had a heart-to-heart connection with these people,” she said. “I like their rocks, I like how they treated each other.” One of the show’s crowning glories—chunks of ammonite fossils over 100 million years old—comes from that family’s Madagascar mine. In this fall’s show—the biggest show yet—glossy spires of black and white agate sit next to bright copper hearts and ghostly selenite lamps. Laura Kitchen, who has visited the shop from her Sacramento home for the last decade, said she has learned a great deal from Ms. Welch and her temple keepers. On Monday, she purchased a glossy, tiered piece of green calcite. “Green speaks to the heart and throat chakras, and calcite in particular deals with breaking patterns,” she said. “I learned all of that from here.” Ms. Welch, who is not a geologist by training, said she learns as she goes. “Merchandising rocks is a learning curve for me,” she admits. “So much of the New Age Way of relating to the rock world is just ‘You’re f—ed up, and you need a rock and then you’ll be fine,’” she said. “And that is not what I’m about.” At Spirit Matters, the crystals are part of a legacy of healing and beauty. “Before cities, we went to the local seer, or medicine man,” Ms. Driscoll said. “There’s years and generations of history that come down to these stones and what they offer.” The ones in the show, she said, are organized “by beauty.” Gesturing to a large piece of ammonite, Ms. Welch said that during hard times, “having some geological perspective is actually kind of nice.” She loves the stones and crystals for their connection to the physical and metaphysical worlds, for the way they remind us what the earth itself can create: “Look at how beautiful they’ve been under millions of years of pressure.”
Spirit Matters is located at 12307 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. in Inverness Park, and is open from Thursday through Monday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.