Is It A Mineral ?

 Quartz

This is my quartz collection. 

I want to explain a little bit about each one because from the picture it is hard to tell what they look like in person. 

The dark round ball is Smokey quarts, it is dark brown and black in certain spots. When we moved it got cracked not sure how but it has a conchoidal fracture all the way around it on the inside of it. It has a vitreous luster.

The chakra wand has a small quarts ball at the top and a long pointed tower at the bottom. If you look really closely you can see the fractures in the ball at the top of the wand. Where these have been polished they have a vitreous luster and feel smooth to the touch.

The smaller of the two towers is a piece of raw quarts that has not been polished. To me, it looks more earthy but it still has some of the vitreous luster of the others. This one was a gift from my husband's aunt so I'm sure how it was cut, because of the way it was cut you cannot see the typical crystalline structure of quartz.

The final piece of quarts has a trigonal crystalline structure, meaning it is triangular in shape. to me, this piece has both an earthy and vitreous luster, the bottom of the tower is cloudy and looks duller than the topmost part where it is almost see though.

Utah has several natural deposits of quartz, mostly in Beaver county. I did not realize until I did the reading for this week that Quartz was a mineral, I always thought it was a stone. I also didn't realize how common quartz was until I did this week's reading.

This isn't an exact picture of what the quartz looked like in the following personal experience, however, it looks close enough to how I remember it looking. ( image pulled from a Google search .) 

When we lived in Spring City Utah when I was younger, maybe 8 or 9, our neighbor had a large chunk of quartz that seemed to grow out of the ground right outside her door. We were able to identify it as quartz by a few determining factors such as hardness - it was hard to break apart and took a lot of effort to even get a small piece to break off luster - it looked like shards of glass coming out of the ground it reflected light and looked shiny, and crystalline structure ( which we had no idea that what it was called ) we looked at the shape of it, tall pointed towers. If I remember right we also used its opaque color to help us determine what kind of mineral/stone it was.