2025 Countdown to the Holidays Schedule
We hope you’ll find exceptional gifts–for others and for you–at the Rock Shop’s annual Countdown to the Holidays sales this year. The shop is open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and Noon-5 p.m. on Sunday. Please note we are closing early at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve and we’ll be closed on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Joyous Solstice/Happy Kwanzaa/Happy New Year and Happy Whatever You Celebrate. When you visit the shop, remember to spend some time in our labyrinth and please send out some prayers and blessings for Peace on Earth (scroll down to see more about the labyrinth).
Walk the Labyrinth to Offer Blessings or Meditate
When Sharron Britton, former owner of the Rock Shop, created the labyrinth in the pine grove behind the shop, she dedicated that stone spiral to the health of the Floridan aquifer. For those who don’t know, that huge geological formation underneath our feet is often compared to Swiss cheese–if Swiss cheese were made of limestone. All those conduits and holes in the limestone contain the groundwater that feeds our springs and provides drinking water for us and millions of other people. Our region would be poor indeed without the Floridan aquifer–one of the most productive aquifers in the world.
Thanks to Steven Earl, a friend of the shop, the center of the labyrinth has a new focus–a beautiful bowl of water with a spiral pattern that reflects the larger pattern. Below is what Steven wrote about how you may use the labyrinth to offer blessings to the aquifer.
Keeping the Spring Bowl, Honoring the Aquifer
The design of the bowl is a continuation of the labyrinth and further focuses the spiral energy. The center of the spiral circle is a place to pause, to be calm, and to be mindful.
The spiral is an open circle that we can enter with our blessings, prayers, and good wishes as we take them to the center where calm and divine order reside. There, we can offer our good wishes for the purity and strong continuance of the Floridan aquifer. While resting in that space of mindfulness and calm, we can receive the Earth’s blessings back to us and exit the spiral with them to radiate out into the world like the outflowing ripples of a concentric circle of water.
It’s a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature and one that is entirely necessary to maintain balance and good order. Through honoring, we foster stewardship and the spiral of life continues.
Like the unmoving center of a children’s merry-go-round or the calm eye of a hurricane, we offer and receive blessings at the center eye of the labyrinth, away from the centrifugal forces at the outer margins.
We invite you to walk the labyrinth to offer whatever blessings you wish or simply to spend some quiet moments in meditation among the pines.
