There is a sentence you have not said. Most people have one at any given time, and it is rarely a dramatic sentence, more often a plain one about what you want or what you are not able to keep doing.
Lapis is the stone for that sentence. Not for winning the argument that follows, which is not something a rock can help with, but for getting the words out of your head and into a form you could actually say at a kitchen table.
What lapis lazuli means
It has carried the same meaning for as long as anything in this list. Truth, plain speech, the thing said out loud. It was buried with pharaohs, cut into Sumerian seals, and ground into the ultramarine that made the blue in paintings people still queue to see, and everywhere it turns up it is associated with what is honest and what is worth saying.
What it can do for you is hold one sentence. That sounds slight until you notice how much of the difficulty in a hard conversation is that the sentence keeps changing shape on the way to your mouth, gathering apologies and softeners until the person in front of you has no idea what you meant. A stone in your hand while you decide the wording is a way of pinning it down.
What it cannot do is make somebody hear it well. The other person’s reaction is theirs, and no preparation and no stone will secure a good response. It also cannot decide for you whether the thing needs saying at all, though the ritual below is fairly good at telling you.
How people use it
Held while rehearsing, which is the main use. Say the sentence aloud with the stone in your hand until it stops collecting extra clauses, and then leave it alone.
Worn on the day of the conversation, so that when the moment arrives and your instinct is to soften everything into vapor, there is something on your hand that remembers what you decided at the table on Sunday.
Kept on the desk by people whose difficult speaking is written: the resignation, the email to the client, the message to the parent. It sits beside the screen and it is the reason a few of those drafts finally get sent rather than saved again.
The card it goes with
The Queen of Swords, who sits above the cloud line with her sword up and one hand open, and who has been unfairly cast as the cold one. She is the person who says the true thing without making you smaller for having needed to hear it.
The intention for both: I will say the plain version, kindly, once. The word once matters. A true sentence repeated four times in an evening turns into something else entirely.
Three minutes at the table
Write the sentence exactly as you would say it, with all the throat clearing you would put in front of it. Then read it back and cross out everything before the actual point.
What is left is usually about nine words long and slightly uncomfortable to look at. Say it out loud once with the stone in your hand, and now you know whether you mean it, which is the real function of the whole exercise.
Wear it
The lapis lazuli ring is the piece in the collection for this, deep blue with the gold flecks visible, and it is worth wearing on the day rather than keeping for good. A ring is in your own eyeline while you talk, which is exactly when the sentence needs a witness.
If the sentence is about somebody unsafe
Then rehearsing it is not the right preparation, and we would rather say so here. If speaking plainly to this person is something you have learned to be careful about, talk to someone outside the situation first, and let the sentence wait until you are not the only one holding it.
Questions people ask
What is lapis lazuli actually good for?
For holding a sentence steady until you have said it. People use it before a conversation that has been postponed, and its usefulness is in the rehearsing rather than in the stone, which has no view on how the conversation will go.
Why is it so expensive?
Because the good material comes from a small number of mines, chiefly in northeast Afghanistan where it has been dug for about six thousand years, and because the deep blue with gold flecks of pyrite is hard to imitate convincingly. Paler, grayer stone is common and much cheaper.
Is it true that painters used it?
Yes, and it is the reason the blue in old paintings glows. Ground lapis made ultramarine, which cost more than gold and was often saved for one robe in the picture. Nothing about that makes the stone powerful. It does mean people have taken it seriously for a very long time.