Opals
DESCRIPTION:
A mineraloid that, in its most precious forms, displays dazzling iridescence
COMPOSITION:
A hydrated form of amorphous silica
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
The “eye stone,” allowing the user total cosmic clarity. Supposedly reflects the mood of the wearer, and sometimes amplifies it.
When Kermit first asks, “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?” you can’t see him. You hear the plucking of the banjo and see a thicket of dense, dark trees from high above. A lens flare casts a multicolored circle around where we imagine Kermit is sitting, somehow in possession of a banjo even though he is both a frog and in the middle of a swamp, but he is obscured as he declares that rainbows, in their lightness and temporality, have nothing to hide.
The song has little to do with the rest of The Muppet Movie, in which Kermit both gathers the rest of the Muppets on his way to California to be a star and is on the run from a man who wants to fry his legs for dinner. It’s the closest we come to an “I want” song, something that positions Kermit as introspective and yearning for more—for whatever is at the end of the rainbow, or for the titular rainbow connection that makes us all stop and stare whenever a rainbow appears. But he doesn’t know he wants to get out of the swamp until a talent agent tells him he can, and even then, he only wants to do it because it could “make millions of people happy.” It’s not the fame that motivates him but the friends he finds along the way, a mishmash of weird creatures whose hidden talents he can see and appreciate in a way the rest of the world can’t. And he promises “someday” we’ll all find this connection. We haven’t gotten there yet, we can’t see it all right now, but don’t worry, we will.
Rainbows are a great metaphor. They mean just about everything, from the roadmap to riches, to the inclusion and celebration of all identities, to God’s promise that he will never wipe out life on earth more than once. It could be because of their typical appearance at the end of a storm, with a pot of gold at the end a fitting reward for enduring the turmoil of wetness and thunder, real or metaphorical. We can see them only at certain times, at certain angles, and when they reveal themselves it feels like a cosmic gift. And then there’s the color—the full spectrum of visible light on display. A rainbow’s power is in revealing every possibility all at once.
Opal has long been valued for its truly fantastic color structure, like a rainbow that has been caught in glass. “Of all precious stones, it is opal that presents the greatest difficulties of description, it displaying at once the piercing fire of carbunculus [garnet], the purple brilliancy of amethystos [amethyst], and the sea-green of smaragdus [emerald], the whole blended together and refulgent with a brightness that is quite incredible,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “Some opals carry such resplendent lustre with them that they are able to match the bravest and richest colors of painters: others represent the flaming fire of brimstone, yea and the bright blaze of burning oil.” It was the most highly prized stone in the Roman empire at the time Pliny wrote and lends itself to intense mythology worldwide. In Indigenous Australian lore, the opal was created when a butterfly got trapped beneath snow, which leeched the color from her wings and placed it in the mountains. Mayan and Aztec people called the red-orange opals forged from volcanoes in Central America quetzalitzlipyollitli, the “bird-of-paradise stone,” and lighter opals vitzitziltecpatl, the “hummingbird stone,” both in honor of quick and colorful creatures that inspire joy and wonder. Like a rainbow, you can never hold them in your hand.
“Rainbow Connection” always makes me cry even though I’ve watched The Muppet Movie dozens of times. I figured it was mostly a trick of the chord progression and any lingering sadness I had about Jim Henson dying too soon. But there’s a worry to it. In the last verse, Kermit asks if you, too, have heard voices in your sleep, calling you to the rainbow. “Is this the sweet sound that calls to young sailors?” he asks. If it’s a sound the sailors heard, then it’s most likely the Sirens singing, birds with the beautiful faces and voices of women whose song inspired seamen to launch themselves overboard. Attempting to find that rainbow connection, one that shines with every color, feels dangerous. Get too close and you’ll be driven mad by its overwhelming power. But, Kermit admits, “I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it. It’s something that I’m supposed to be.” There is a part of him that is trying to get out and shine, and he is compelled to let it, no matter what dangers might lie ahead.
In the Middle Ages in the west, the opal was thought to possess the special virtues of every gem. It brought the profound luck of having not just every stone’s color, but every metaphysical property available to you at the same time, an entire magical arsenal for the price of one. From all our other myths about rainbows, the yearning for them, it seems obvious that a rainbow-colored stone would hold in it the promises of eternity, of vision, and of whatever else makes us write songs about rainbows. But look at it from another angle, and the rainbow looks like a curse. It is too much at once, too many options, each one showing how little any other may matter, how our definitions of ourselves and each other are useless because we are capable of literally anything. We can be many things at once. We can choose many conflicting journeys. The rainbow, the opal, gives us a glimpse of how many ways we can shine, and our narrow idea of our pasts and possible futures are rendered useless. That may not feel like luck.
In Sir Walter Scott’s 1829 novel Anne of Geierstein, an opal reveals a woman to be, perhaps, a witch. Hermione, a mysterious Persian woman, arrives and steals the heart of the Baron of Arnheim. She wears an opal in her hair every day, which darkens when she is upset, brightens when she is happy, and shoots a “little spark, or tongue of flame” when she is in a particular mood. Her handmaids report that she is unusually quiet for a few moments each night after removing it from her hair and that she’s always worried about it, as if it were the source of some greater power: “Even in the use of holy water at the door of the church she was observed to omit the sign of the cross on the forehead, for fear, it was supposed, of the water touching the valued jewel.”
One day, the baron flicks a few drops of holy water on Hermione’s head while entering the church, and “the opal, on which one of these drops had lighted, shot out a brilliant spark like a falling star, and became the instant afterwards lightless and colourless as a common pebble, while the beautiful Baroness sank on the floor of the chapel with a deep sigh of pain.” The opal was thought to carry some sort of connection to the devil, which was undone by the blessed water. She was carried to her bed, where the next day nothing but a pile of ash remained.
In The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, written in 1913, George Frederick Kunz makes reference to what was, by then, the widely accepted notion that opals are bad luck, something he calls a “foolish modern superstition.” Some attributed this to a misreading of Anne of Geierstein, and others to other stories, but according to Kunz the beauty of the opal, which was fully appreciated by past generations, was marred only by people looking for something to be afraid of. However, he contradicts himself, as every historic reference he draws on for proof of the power and beauty of the stone implies some sort of trickery. He calls the opal “a fit emblem” of inconstancy in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and quotes Dr. Stephen Batman, writing in the mid-1500s, on how the opal has the power to “Smithe [men] with a maner blindness, that is called Amnetia, so that they may not see neither take heede what is done before their eyen.” Still, Kunz calls his nineteenth-century contemporaries “altogether unreasonable—and indeed almost inexplicable” for being wary of the opal. Sure, they may crack all the time. Sure, “black opals” were often cheap, white stones dipped in ink. But how can you resist all the colors and light of the world in one object, which from the moment you hold it begins to decay?
Opals have never quite been able to escape the fear that they bring bad luck. It’s in part because they are temperamental and soft. Heat and moisture can change their color and make them crack, and they can scratch when banged against hard surfaces. How disturbing that a rock, a symbol of solidity, is so easily broken. Hermione’s main problem was not being a witch, but wearing an opal every day, something most jewelers would now tell you would make the stone crumble right out of its setting. The opal is a beautiful thing, meant to be held at arm’s length. Don’t look at it, it’s too beautiful. Don’t touch it, you’ll only fuck it up. Don’t try to own it, because it will only change on you.
The rainbow is only the spectrum visible to humans. There are butterflies and shrimp and birds that can see ultraviolet light, snakes and frogs that can sense infrared. The lure of the rainbow Kermit sings of is that the rainbow is both everything, and also proof that there is more. We are presented with the limits of our own vision, with how much we fundamentally can’t see and that we must figure out how to sense in other ways. For many of us, there is terror in that revelation—however much we want the things, the people, around us to grow and experiment and blossom, we want that to have already happened, and whatever is in front of us to be fixed. You can be whoever you want, but for there to be more than we can see makes us uncomfortable. How uncomfortable, then, is the opal, which is suspected to have the “ability to bring one’s traits and characteristics to the surface for examination and transformation,” everything that can be seen and everything that was already there but couldn’t. It is the “eye stone,” which allows you to focus on every aspect of yourself—even what’s hidden from you—and helps you to understand clearly that which you’d rather ignore. It is said to amplify every thought and feeling, make the unconscious conscious and ready for examination. It can make you not just multiple things, but everything all at once. It’s a knowledge that, sometimes, is too overwhelming to bear.
In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath wrote of starving at the foot of a metaphorical fig tree because she felt unable to choose which branch she wanted to eat from. “One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out,” and she wanted them all but couldn’t have them. She had to choose one, or maybe a few, but certainly not all. And instead of choosing, she watches as they all wither away.
When I read that passage, what makes me sad is not that she can’t have them all, but that she can’t choose which she wants, which are related but distinct problems. Because the idea of all is just too overwhelming. I wouldn’t know what to do with the husband, professor, and South America figs all in the palm of my hand. Instead, I like the act of choosing. Ideally it’s easy, with one fig looking so ripe and sweet that all thoughts of how the others might taste disappear. But even when it isn’t, a choice is an act of control. An unknown fig can’t fall on your head if you had the wherewithal to pick it first. There are no surprises when you know what you’re doing.
The rainbow, the opal, gives us a glimpse of how many ways we can shine, and our narrow idea of our pasts and possible futures are rendered useless. That may not feel like luck.
At first glance the promise of the opal seems to be the clarity and intuition to understand what you’re choosing. When you can see every option before you, there’s nothing unknown, and you can step forward with the confidence that you foresaw all the consequences. Of course, when you see everything you also see all the fruit you didn’t eat, and even if you’re happy with the figs you have, every choice you make cuts another one off. Every choice is a little death, a facet of yourself that won’t get to shine. It’s a small sacrifice to make, though, for the comfort of building and enforcing a solid reality. It’s a way to turn the rainbow illusion into something real.
The opal is also a good stone for people of independent spirit, for those who “wish to live by their own rules,” which would seem in opposition to a stone that lets you see the world clearly enough to build a sturdy life. Free spirits typically don’t take to staying on one path. But there is nothing more independent than making your own choices, by yourself, free of influence. To be independent means having a life where nothing else can touch you, where you can keep moving if you sense a shadow creeping up behind you, where the fruit doesn’t weigh you down. Where you never have to acknowledge that your choices aren’t the only things that affect you. Where you never have to reckon with the parts of the spectrum you can’t see.
I have a bad habit of running away with a plan on first suggestion and taking the present as a constant. An idea turns into a promise, something I can rely on and shape my life around instead of a temporary flash. More than once, my partner has had to talk me down from hyperventilating over the smallest changes in a plan (or not even changes, because the only plan that existed was one I began making up without telling anyone). Sometimes I lie in bed and ask my partner what they would do in unlikely situations. What if tomorrow you wanted kids and I didn’t? What if we have to move in with our parents? What would you do if we could never have sex again? What if you change your mind? And I’m never satisfied when the answer is, “I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out together,” which is always what it is. I demand to know every outcome for every possibility so I know the edges of what my life can be. Because infinity is terrifying. If you can do anything, then who are you? How can you define your life, yourself, when you have no boundaries?
A joke I make whenever I’m watching a movie or show that involves a surprise party is that I’d hate to have a surprise party. It seems in line with my character as someone who likes to know what’s going on, someone who gets anxious over guest lists and friends who haven’t met mingling, someone who would hate to have a party sprung on her if she weren’t in the mood to party. It’s become a hard rule if just for the fact that one surprise would seem to invite another. But lately I’ve been longing to shine up and reveal the part of my opalescence that would love to be showered and surprised by those who love me, and I have no idea how to ask for it. I’ve already picked my figs and set my boundaries. There’s no way I can ask for something as small as this without changing everything.
Change is scary because it’s concrete proof that, for all our choosing, we’ve never been in control and we can never relax. It’s not just that an earthquake may strike at any moment no matter what we have planned for that afternoon. It’s that there’s more to us, to everyone, just below the surface, waiting to get out.
My first reaction to anything is that it’s either good or bad, or something I want or something that was designed specifically to punish me and throw my life into turmoil. I long tried to find reasons why change has felt so uniquely terrifying to me. Is it because my mom and I had to suddenly move out of our apartment when I was thirteen, or because I was in Manhattan during 9/11? Was it because a whole semester of college was canceled because of Hurricane Katrina? Every time my life has been radically altered by things beyond my control, I’ve looked for the cause. But while I’ve relaxed to the idea of train delays and sudden death, I still cling to people, myself and others, as fixed beings. For a long time I thought this was because I was certain that people don’t change; that the only thing you can trust is that people who attempt it will revert to who you’ve always known them to be. It’s just easier to think of something, someone, myself, as an eternal truth.
But of course, people change, and my partner reminds me that anytime they or someone else I love has revealed a new part of themselves, I think they’re going to leave me. It happens when friends move away, have kids, or choose a type of life I wouldn’t choose. It happened when my partner lost weight a few years ago and began receiving more attention for their appearance, which at once made me feel deeply possessive and deeply aware of our cultural biases around body types. It happened when they started a job that made them happier and started relying on me a little less to provide the good in their life. And it happened when their presentation slowly started shifting, when they showed up to a date wearing eyeliner and I said it was sexy, and it was sexy, and then suddenly I couldn’t feel the edges anymore. It happened in our long conversations about the nature of gender and masculinity, both of us trying to reckon with who we had been told to be and what we wanted, which fueled my fear that my partner would discover that what they wanted wasn’t me. And it happened when I got their text on the way to work—“fuck, I think I’m genderqueer”—and even though I saw it coming from a mile away, and it was the closest I’ve ever been to feeling purely thrilled at a revelation, the voice crept in like water through floor cracks: this is it, I was just a pit stop of support and love, a fixed point against which they could define a part of their life before moving on to where they wanted to be.
Change seems like the wrong word to use for people. More often than not, when someone seems to change, they are just revealing a truth we weren’t privy to before. When some thing changes, they might tell you to your face that it hasn’t. They will assure you this is who they’ve been the whole time, deep down, and the only difference is the subtext is now text—a shimmering rainbow in the opal that has finally caught the light. Everything is the same, no one has strayed from the path. But even then my reaction is the same: panic. I feel betrayed, and while I’ll act like it’s the other person who has betrayed me, what I really feel is fury that I have clung so tightly to my sense of the world that I have no room for the wholeness of the people I love. I don’t know the excitement of the new-to-me. All I know is the feeling of something bubbling up, the bursting steam and stinging heat hitting me in the middle of the night as I watch them sleep, same as ever before. Was this always true? Did I just miss it before? And if so, what am I missing now? What parts of them can’t I see?
Sometimes it feels less like fear and more like jealousy, because I realize I feel fixed. I have had a list of things I am that helps me move through my world, not necessarily identities, but a set of data points I mistook for trends and facts. I have told myself I’m someone who writes, I’m someone who cares, I’m a lifelong New Yorker, I’m a hard worker, I’m mixed race, I’m a woman. As much as I’d resent anyone else for defining me solely by these terms, these were the neatly carved edges of my life, things I went back to when I lost my sense of self and needed to know what it was okay to be and to want. And I told myself these weren’t just a few opalescent facets I was reflecting to the world. They were my whole self.
Lately I’ve been wondering what my edges really are, and finding they don’t exist. I am someone who writes, but I don’t have to be. I’m a hard worker, but it’s something I’ve developed to shield myself from the profound laziness that seems to take over sometimes for no discernible reason. On rare occasions I think of what would happen if I left New York and realize, reluctantly, that I could make myself into the kind of person who would leave New York. I feel myself shimmer with every conflicting thought, my mind racing from wanting everything from everyone with no compromise. I’m cracking into a thousand shining pieces.
Change seems like the wrong word to use for people. More often than not, when someone seems to change, they are just revealing a truth we weren’t privy to before.
At first, Kermit sounds like he’s disagreeing with the premise of his first question. Sometimes I listen to “Rainbow Connection” and I hear a mocking tone in his voice, like he’s imitating his detractors. Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what’s on the other side when there is no such thing as an “other side” to a rainbow? They’re a trick of the light that somehow bears the weight of our loaded, paranoid metaphors. But then, Kermit says those who say rainbows are only illusions are plainly wrong, and the answer to his question becomes obvious. There are so many songs about rainbows because wanting to see more, be more, is all we ever write about.
In 2010 a man named Paul Vasquez went viral for his video reaction to a double rainbow in Yosemite National Park. He keeps repeating “wow” and “whoa,” unable to come up with more descriptive language because just look at it, it’s a double rainbow! He’s crying at some points, insisting that this vision must mean something and asking the universe to tell him. The video became a joke; some people laughed at his accent and stoner proclamations, and some probably found his enthusiasm heartwarming but were still amused by a grown man thinking a rainbow is cool. But when I watch it now, I nearly cry with him, the same way I do whenever I hear “Rainbow Connection,” because he and Kermit seem to get it. I cry at the thought of finding beauty in temporality and change, of seeing a rainbow and not fearing that it’ll go away. I imagine being thankful, not terrified, for whatever angle I’m standing at that lets me see a part of the rainbow, and grateful for the knowledge that there is always more to see, and that something so delicate and changeable has the power to exist at all.
Like a rainbow, the opal is created by water. It’s a hydrated form of silica, an amorphous structure rather than a crystalline one, in which silica spheres are pressed together in a way that diffracts light from all angles. It is one of the most naturally captivating stones; a miner coming across an uncut diamond or citrine may not see much, but a vein of shimmering opal looks like the sun setting over the ocean in late summer. It looks like bioluminescence kicked up to the night sky from the sand. It stands out without a jeweler’s touch. Opal’s beauty is delicate, not delineated by any defined geometric shape, but more like a solid gel. It would not survive the tectonic movements that can be withstood by diamonds. But just because an opal can’t survive as much pressure doesn’t mean it’s not strong enough to withstand some surprises. In 2008, the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found opals on Mars. The hydrated silica was evidence to scientists that there had, at least at some point, been water on the planet. “We see numerous outcrops of opal-like minerals, commonly in thin layers extending for very long distances around the rim of Valles Marineris and sometimes within the canyon system itself,” said Ralph Milliken of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These minerals are proof that water existed more recently than scientists had previously thought, which increases the likelihood that Mars supported life. A planet we’re still trying to figure out is a fitting home for an opal. It went from a dusty red nothing to a potential home. “The opaline silica deposits would be good places to explore to assess the potential for habitability on Mars, especially in these younger terrains,” Milliken said. If Mars can be a home for something as delicate and changing as opal, maybe one day it could be a home for delicate, changing humanity.
I have many opals because it’s my birthstone. I was born in October, under a sign known for mysteriousness, so maybe that’s why the opal was assigned to this month. Scorpios are supposedly temperamental, jealous, loyal, calculated, sex-obsessed freaks. We contain multitudes, and all our traits and characteristics are already at the surface, ready to explode at the slightest provocation. What others see as change we see as strategic revelation. After all, rainbows have nothing to hide. Perhaps I am not a good Scorpio because it’s taken me so long to understand this. But my true love for the opal is that it reminds me that stability can be a type of death. If it supposedly lets me see everything for what it is, it also urges me to see how quickly that landscape shifts, that it is not mine to build on. And that change isn’t a betrayal, but a gift.
If there is a tarot for everything, the High Priestess card might be the card for opals. It traditionally depicts a woman sitting on a throne, a crescent moon at her feet, a dazzling curtain of wild pomegranates behind her. The card represents the veil between the conscious and subconscious, the gateway to the unknown that is no less real because it is hidden, and the journey to reveal both what we know and what we don’t. And it asks if the reader is worthy of that knowledge. When describing the High Priestess tarot card in her book Inner Witch, writer and witch Gabriela Herstik wrote about the power of uniting all parts of ourselves. “Union of other and self is truth; both in the personal and the divine,” she said. “This is also true of all the parts of ourselves. The sexual and the spiritual, the shadows and the light, the blooming and the wilting; the High Priestess reflects our divine multitudes back at us. Nothing in this world is one dimensional, and neither are we.”
Sometimes I get a glimpse of this woman I could be, want to be, and am all at once, comfortable with the ebbs and flows of humanity, finding excitement rather than fear in the possibility of anything. Sometimes I wear an opal and think of her, me—a woman who may be one person one day and a different person the next, but who knows they are both authentic; who is welcoming of whatever version of herself she presents to the world and whatever others are and will be in return. I am the person Kermit sings that he and I and everyone is perhaps supposed to be. A person who knows that just because she can’t see it all the time doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it is possible to be both solid and changeable. What a blessing to find the rainbow connection. What luck.
