wish my scanner did a better pix tho. it's gorgeous.
lots of pudding stone (conglomerate rock) in evidence, which wasn't surprising--this is just a few blocks from the river. pudding stone is formed when smaller rocks get stuck in sediments & water & pressure cements them into new rocks. sometimes it's really colorful & interesting. so i looked around thru this. then i see this rainbow & gold flashing at me out of bright teal aqua. it was about half-covered in rainbows when i first saw it, so it was really intense. & it hit me smack in the middle i'd found a piece of rainbow obsidian. i looked around awhile & didn't see any more. not without digging out half the embankment anyway. i marked the spot with stones & continued on. found a little broken glass which obviously came from bottles. these had colorful rainbow discolorations from weathering on them also. so you see trying to identify glass you find as obsidian can be difficult. if it's black glass & has ash hardened on the outside you know it's obsidian, tho you might mistake it for a "normal" rock if it's not broken open. however obsidian comes in a lot of other colors. black or snowflake are the usual types. on top of this sometimes it's more opaque, & sometimes completely transparent. & here i am with this piece of strange transparent broken glass trying to figure out why i was absolutely convinced it was obsidian at first sight.
i took some of the discolored man-made glass home too. i found that rubbing on this with a soft chalky rock took the rainbow off. true rainbow obsidian however doesn't have rainbows from weathering. it gets them from tiny bubbles inside which formed by air or water pockets. this is kind of like how quartz gets rainbows from internal fractures.
well, i briefly salt-watered & cleaned the piece, i still saw rainbows on it when i held it to the light at the right angle. some lights/angles you get better rainbows. & it was mostly transparent but hard to see inside cause of damage. however it has a smooth swirl flow down the front that i've seen in raw obsidian--you can tell how it flowed as the glass formed. i'm not sure whether or not man-made glass would break showing this same smooth type of swirl flow. it's flatter on the back but curved--conchidal or shell-like, the term applied to rock with blind cleavage. obsidian cools too quick to form crystals (which is why it's glass), so without cleavage lines you get these rounded pieces. the convex side is a little bumpy & has a lot of frosty scuffing. also a deep score as if a sharp point/rock had been dragged thru it. but the front looks like it was broken off after this scuffing occurred & more like raw glass. the swirl flow on front also has scratches/striations that look more recent than the back scuffing. the front also has splinter damage & smaller conchidal chips out. scuffed areas on glass are no longer transparent--until you get them wet. then they resemble the raw glass on the front. i expect this raw shard has another scuffed-sided piece somewhere--probably buried who knows where by the bulldozers.
i put it with a selenite wand to heal its breaking & got a clink! sound of breaking glass & a feel of glass being transmitted. a feel of heavy ice or snow. also i had a lot of weird audio-type effects that night normally associated with obsidian, & felt like it projected itself on me a few times (i've had this happen most often with a mahogany obsidian ball). a few days later i decided to test its point of origin by using my quartz tabby. the tabby transmits other stones to me very well. btw i have had quartz transmit images of glass manufacturing before. once i accidentally put a large glass bead with stones in a saltwater bath. & left the bowl in the room with the tumbler--& tiny pieces of quartzified grit left out in a bowl next to it. & a ton of rocks on top of that. what a night that was... at least i saw the long vats with the hot glass too--which had me thoroughly confused till i found the glass bead. anyway i was reasonably sure if this teal rainbow was manufactured & not obsidian, i might pick that up.
well, i warmed the tabby up for an hour in some indirect light on the coffee table. & bravely (haha) i took them into the bedroom with me instead of letting the tabby transmit from the kitchen. the tabby naturally got so supercharged being with another rainbow rock, it about lit my head like a match. even with the onyx in there for extra grounding. most of what i got at first was magnification of the internal structure, since the tabby is good at transmitting this or facets. & altho i could see glass flow it was hard because i was almost at microscope range. but then i got quite a few visions, even if they were a little hard to focus on for long. thus: apparently it flowed next to black obsidian, also an older black flow nearby that's snowflaked by now (or was when the teen in the vision found it, i just saw his perspective & heard his voice, i didn't see him). also 2 thin separate iron flows in all this molten stuff.. several clink! sounds, one repeated & rumbly that seemed connected to a rock fall. & a lot of native american energy! i saw a man & got a couple quick glimpses into a home as well. i could feel this was a time before there were white people in the area. unfortunately i couldn't hold the images long enough to look at all the objects inside. got images of the river too. also some 1800's cultural stuff like an old-fashioned train (the place i found it is across from a train track) & tipsy guys arguing in a building. then it showed me why obsidian's supposed to help you be clairaudient-- or why it talks to you. remember the blind cleavage? it's because it gets these little conchidal "ears." you can see the indentation "ear" on the middle top. & it showed me bubbles inside too...
i cleaned it again so i could go look for bubbles. & wet made it completely transparent--the scuffing & scratching disappeared & it looked like raw glass. it has a big giant bubble inside & several tiny ones. & also few tiny threads of black inside the back. something it picked up from black obsidian?
uses: i'm still ascertaining that. most people correlate the teal/aqua w/ blue. i'm sure it has the properties of blue obsidian which would connect it to the throat chakra: communication matters & music are usually mentioned here. also protection against negativity--whether this makes it a smudge magnet like the darker varieties remains to be seen. i have caught it blinking itself at me like dark obsidian--& its blink was like a dark obsidian. (i usually interpret this to mean it wants cleaning, & you'd better clean it before it gets noisy :P) anyway the conchidal "ears" make sense here.