The Good Vibrations Tour

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

We’re back from wallowing in the (somewhat limited because it’s not tourist season) fleshpots of coastal Maine. It was a really nice break from dealing with what winter has done to our house, driveway and psyches. And speaking of Crystal Energy Healing Power (just seeing if you’re paying attention), did you know that amethyst is supposed to help with anxiety, sleeplessness and symptoms of ADD/ADHD? Well, according to the proprietor of a little shop we visited where shelves of precious and semi-precious stones and crystals attracted my crow-like children’s eyes, it is.

It’s no secret that both of my kids and my dh have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. However, after living with the effects of ADD for lo these thirty years (in June), I can’t help but wonder why it’s called Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD instead of Attention Surfeit Syndrome or …  Ah, maybe that’s why.  After all, everyone I know who has the diagnosis has no problem paying attention. Give them something they’re interested in and you can’t tear their attention away. Put them in a room where there’s a lot going on and they’ll pay attention - to everything at once - which effectively means that they don’t pay attention to anything.

I have the opposite of ADD, whatever that is. I can focus on anything unless there’s a full-blown melee going on or someone is throwing food at me, so, I don’t need an amethyst crystal to help me keep my mind on what I’m doing. Daughter, on the other hand, who has trouble sleeping to the point where she’s been known to waken and run to the window several times a night in the autumn when the leaves are falling, because one fell outside her window, does need an amethyst or anything else that will help her relax and get those zzz’s that are so necessary to her well-being. (Not to mention that when she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.)

So we got an amethyst and she put it under her pillow in the motel room and it worked. She slept like a top. That, of course, led to a discussion of whether there really is anything to the whole “crystal energy healing” that the shopkeeper talked about while we were there. My theory, and I always have one, is that there might be something to it, because of vibrations.

Physics teaches us that everything in the known universe vibrates constantly. Every piece of matter and anti-matter, including the matter that makes up the human body, is moving at a frequency of its own. (Of course, with humans, you tend to notice it more when they’ve had a lot of coffee.) So why shouldn’t crystal vibrations have an effect on humans?

While I don’t want to teach my kids that every cockamamie theory that New Age devotees come up with makes sense, I don’t want them to have closed minds either. And, of course, there’s the ol’ placebo effect. My feeling is that why it works makes very little difference as long as it does work. If Daughter sleeps better because she thinks the amethyst helps her sleep, then it’s helping her sleep.

Coincidentally, my brother sent me some large chunks of salt crystals for my birthday. They’re supposed to help clear positive ions from the vicinity of computers and electronics OR you can take a bath with them in the water and it relaxes you. I opted for the clearing the air wheeze and have two of them next to my PC. I can’t tell if they’re generating any negative ions, but they sure are pretty and soothing to look at. (And in a pinch, I could break a little piece off and sprinkle it onto my sandwich if I forget to salt it before I bring it downstairs from the kitchen.)

Besides absorbing crystal lore, we spent some time beach combing and also visited The Farnsworth Art Museum, home of the Wyeth collection. Both of my young artists were inspired, so after the museum we went to a really well-stocked art supply store in Camden and bought enough oil pastels, oil paints, paper and brushes to equip all three of the Wyeths. We walked around Camden until we felt like we lived there. We had several really good meals and the kids loaded up on cable TV, because we don’t have much TV at all at home.

The only downside to our trip was that my usual bad hotel karma was working. We had booked our hotel from Wednesday night to Wednesday morning, so I was flummoxed when the bill slid under our door on Saturday afternoon. When I talked to the manager about it, he said he’d understood that we wanted the room for four nights and had already reserved that particular room for someone else, so we’d have to take a smaller room with double beds rather than queen-sized beds if we stayed.

We decided to spend our last two nights in Bangor, so I made a reservation at a motel there, telling them that we wanted a “quiet room with two queen beds on the first floor.” The woman I talked to said there’d be no problem with that. However, when we arrived and went to the desk, another woman told us that we had a room with two double beds.

“But, I specifically asked for queen-sized beds,” I told her.

“Well,” she said, sounding as if I should know this, “There ARE no rooms with queen beds on the first floor. They’re all doubles.”

“Okay,” I said, “Then how about something on the second floor.”

She said that was doable, so we got our keys and headed up to our room. It was spacious, clean and quiet, so we brought our bags up and were unpacking when a horrendous whining noise broke out in the room next to us. It sounded like about a hundred dentists drilling at once. We all looked at each other in shock. I phoned down to the front desk and asked the desk clerk what the heck was going on and she told me that some repairmen were fixing a light, but they’d be done soon.

Two hours later, they were done and we settled down to some peace and quiet. We sent out for pizza, watched a little TV and went to bed, only to be awakened at 11:30 by the new occupants of the room next door (we were calling it Hell Room by this time). They seemed to consist of about twelve toddlers and seven yappy little dogs, but at breakfast the next morning, we met them and it was two toddlers, an infant and one yappy little dog with ADHD. Boy, could that crew have used some amethysts.