I do not believe in crystals

I should say at the top that I do not believe crystals do anything.

I have a chemistry degree I have not used since 2009 and a low tolerance for the word frequency used outside of physics. My sister has amethyst on every windowsill in her house in Saco and I have been unkind about it at family dinners more than once.

She booked the session for my birthday, which is a genuinely irritating move, because you cannot refuse a gift on principle without becoming the person who refuses gifts on principle.

Ines Ordoñez works out of a converted sunporch off Route 1 in Kennebunk. I had constructed her in my head — scarves, incense, a certain voice. She met me at the door in a fleece vest and asked if I wanted coffee. She had a French press and a mug that said BIDDEFORD RUNNERS CLUB.

I told her within about ninety seconds that I did not believe in this. I had planned that. I wanted it on the record.

She said, "Okay." Then she asked whether I still wanted to do it.

I said yes, because my sister had paid.

"That's fine," she said. "You don't have to believe anything. You have to lie down for fifty minutes and not talk. That's the whole ask."

Here is what a crystal session physically is, since nobody had told me and I would have liked to know.

You lie on your back on a padded table, clothed, under a blanket. She talks you through where she is going to place things and asks permission before each area. Then she puts stones on you. Not many — nine, in my case. One at the crown of my head on the table, not on me. One at the base of my throat. One on my sternum. One below my navel. One in each palm. Two by my feet. One she held for a while and then set down beside my hip without explanation.

They are heavier than you expect. That was my first actual observation and it was not spiritual. A stone the size of a plum on your breastbone is a real weight and you feel your own breathing move it.

Then she sat down about four feet away and did nothing for fifty minutes.

That is the part I was not prepared for. I had braced for narration — for someone telling me what she was sensing, what my aura was doing, what my third eye required. She said nothing. She did not touch me again. She sat in a chair and, as far as I could tell with my eyes closed, simply stayed there.

The first ten minutes I did what I do, which is think. I made an inventory of the ways this was nonsense. I composed roughly a paragraph of what I would say to my sister. I noticed I was doing that and kept doing it.

Somewhere in the second ten minutes I stopped, and I did not notice stopping, which is how you know it happened.

I do not have a dramatic account. Nothing rose out of me. No colors, no visions, no revelations about my father. What I have is this: I lay on a table in a converted sunporch in Kennebunk for fifty minutes with weights on my chest and a stranger sitting quietly nearby, and I was more still than I have been in a very long time. My jaw came apart. I could hear a truck on Route 1 and it did not annoy me.

At the end she rang nothing, said nothing, and just waited until I opened my eyes.

I asked her — because I am who I am — what she thought the stones were doing.

"I don't know," she said. "I know what I was taught. I know what people tell me afterward. I can't prove a mechanism to you and I'm not going to pretend I can."

I liked her enormously for that.

So here is my report, and it is not the one I intended to file.

I still do not believe crystals do anything. I have no new evidence and I am not going to manufacture some. If you asked me to defend the practice on its own terms I could not, and neither, honestly, could she.

But something was true in that room, and I have had to be more careful about how I dismiss things since.

Fifty minutes. Lying down. Not talking. Not producing anything. Weighted. Attended to by a person whose entire job for that hour was to sit near me and not need anything from me.

I do not know when the last time was that anyone gave me that. I am forty-three.

I told my sister the stones did nothing. She said, "Sure." She's letting me have it.

I still do not believe crystals do anything. But something was true in that room, and I have had to be more careful about how I dismiss things since.