About Moth & Myth

Moth & Myth Minerals is a small business run by me, Kaelyn Harding. I grew up digging for fossils in West Texas with my grandpa, a paleontologist named Bryan Cooney, whose years of dedication to science and teaching at the Colorado School of Mines filled minds and museums alike with his knowledge and discovered specimens. I followed him around Gem and Mineral shows in Denver as soon I was old enough to not need to touch everything I found shiny. On family vacations, I begged to stop at every rock shop we found in the mountains. I love the smell of freshly sawed open geodes, and I lick things I can't identify.

What this all amounts to, I suppose, is that I loved the earthen-world long before I knew it was something I wanted to try to make a living on. Even now, I find it hard to comprehend that people like when I spend hours sending them pictures of weird rocks or when I make terrible rock jokes.

I ran out of space for my personal collection. Luckily, I can still indulge in buying specimens if I sell them to other people afterwards, and so Moth & Myth was born.

What do moths or myths have to do with gems and minerals? Well, it is either a moth or a magpie attracted to shiny bright things that inhabits my brain. As for the myth, I am a writer who values the folklore and legends that crystals and gemstones hold in cultures around the world. The wonders the earth produces are already fascinating from a geological perspective, but the role they play in religions, mythology, and history is equally fascinating. To my metaphysical practitioners, I welcome you, but I make no claims to practice the art or to intuitively choose specimens. I am a whimsical beast, and every decision I make is based on aesthetic, mood, and random chance.

There's a kind of magic in that too, I think.

What anyone who visits Moth & Myth can expect, however, is that I will have done my diligence in ensuring the marvels contained herein are genuine, beautiful, and just a shred magical. At least, as magical as the literal building blocks of life, the world, and the universe can be. That's not any particular belief talking. That's just fact.

Which is pretty damn magical, if you ask me.