Moonstones are often found tucked inside ordinary-looking rock, hidden beneath layers of dirt and pressure and time. You don’t stumble across one lying in the open very often. You dig. You sift. You get filthy. You spend hours staring at what looks like nothing before discovering something worth carrying home. Prospecting has a funny way of changing your assumptions. Climb into enough holes looking for treasure and eventually you realize everybody has dirt on them. Every story comes with a mess. Every life comes with scars. The trick is digging long enough to find the gemstones underneath.
This one took some digging.
Moonstone first appeared during my MOPS years, which tracks because half of my gemstone collection seems to have originated in church basements full of tired mothers surviving on caffeine and blind optimism. Moonstone had four kids just like I did. She could walk into a room carrying the weight of her own life and still notice everyone else. A Red Bull was never far away. Neither was a thoughtful question. She loves deeply, thinks deeply, creates fearlessly, and has a rare ability to sit comfortably inside complicated conversations. Most people start looking for exits when things get uncomfortable. Moonstone pulls up a chair.
She respects complexity in a way I will always admire. People are rarely all good or all bad. Situations are rarely simple. Relationships are rarely neat. She understands that without needing a warning label or a three-part sermon series. Years ago, she sat in a storytelling group I was leading and immediately understood the real assignment: gather people, ask better questions, listen carefully, and let people tell the truth about their lives without rushing in to rewrite the ending. Stories matter because people matter.
Our friendship wasn’t built through constant proximity. We were busy raising families, serving, building lives, and trying to keep tiny humans alive. What made the friendship meaningful wasn’t frequency. It was depth. If one of us called and said, “I need to talk,” shoes went on and we headed toward the school near my house. The walk was never the point. The conversation was. An hour was the estimate. Four hours was usually closer to reality. By the time we got home, we had usually solved nothing and understood everything a little better.
Moonstone also carried a kind of energy that matched mine in a way very few people ever have. One year we built a nearly life-sized airplane out of insulation foam board because someone thought giving creative women a theme and a supply budget seemed like a responsible decision. We created worlds for children, turned ordinary rooms into temporary magic, and convinced ourselves sleep was optional. Most people eventually burned out trying to keep up with whatever ridiculous project I was excited about. Moonstone never did. If I showed up with an idea, she was already figuring out how to make it bigger.
Then one day she wasn’t there.
There was no dramatic ending. Just distance. At the time, I didn’t understand it. I missed her. I missed her family. I missed looking across a room full of children and knowing she would be standing there too. I spent a long time looking at the distance instead of the friendship.
Years later, I found myself standing in territory that looked painfully familiar.
The deeper I dug, the more the shape of the friendship changed. What once felt personal started looking like survival. What once felt confusing started making sense. What once felt like rejection started looking a lot more like someone carrying a burden I hadn’t picked up yet.
When she rolled up to my house one day to drop off her kid to hang with mine, we stood in my front yard talking for probably and hour. The conversation felt familiar, not because nothing had changed, but because we were finally standing on the same side of an experience that had once separated us.
The hardest part was never losing a place.
The hardest part was losing your people.
Not completely. Just enough to notice their absence. The people who knew the stories. The people who remembered the details. The people who could look at an old photograph, a fantastic foam-board airplane, a shared joke, or a roll of toilet paper and say, “Yeah. I remember that too.”
The loneliness wasn’t about being alone. It was about carrying memories that suddenly had fewer witnesses.
That realization changed everything.
Moonstones are associated with intuition, transition, and emotional depth. They reveal themselves slowly. The light shifts and suddenly something that looked ordinary reveals an entirely different layer underneath. For years I thought Moonstone left me behind. It took walking the same trail myself to realize she was simply farther ahead.
That is why I keep collecting gemstones.
Not because I’m trying to rebuild what was lost.
Not because I’m trying to go backward.
I’m gathering witnesses.
People who helped write the stories.
People who remember them.
People who can still point to a chapter that feels impossibly far away and say, “I was there.”
A good prospector knows there is a difference between dirt and treasure.
Sometimes the treasure survives underground for a very long time.
Some people bring light with them when they walk into a room. Moonstone has always been one of those people.
Honestly, Sandie 
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