Category: rocks

Hiatus

In geology, a hiatus is considered to be a gap in the rock record. When you look at rock layers, you are seeing a representation of time. A hiatus occurs when no deposition or erosion of sediments is evident and it appears that nothing has changed and no time has passed.

In truth the rate of sedimentation and erosion are simply equal so no record is preserved, although time passed as it must.

In life, too, hiatuses occur. We become still and unproductive, even though the moon still passes overhead. Change relentlessly impacts our mind, body and soul whether we will it or not, but we perceive only our own stillness.

Time

I have had almost no desire to come to this place of words.

There is a great stillness in me that aches, leaning towards all the sorrow of our lost honor, the relentless cruelty that has publicly obliterated the image of who I knew my community, my homeland to be. Kind. I thought of us as mainly kind.

Cold, still.

Now I only wish to duck my head and weep. The record of this will remain, sadly. Would that I might be the hiatus. Forgotten.

What would it take to see a sweeter image? How much ‘forest bathing’ would clear the slate of greed, hate geared manipulation, and simple selfish evil. Is there a story to image a grain of hope?

Entry into the Forest

Please. Share a story. We all need one.

Apart from Time

Eastern Sierra Nevada

Time moves easily on, but I seem to be slumped in the corner here. I have a desire to move forward and accomplish something; this is the image of me slowly hardening into the amber, caught by the golden sunlight, unaware of my demise. I am sure that a reader might find this image of my personal lithification depressing. Please don’t. I am not so outrageous in most of my life, but a little macabre imagery seems to tickle me right now. Acceptance is a gift of the spirit; it is the movement of life with recognition of its own impermanence. Sometimes it makes me sad, sometimes I look right at it and laugh out loud.

Geology has always been my stabilizing rock, so to speak. It has given me the gift of perspective. In memory, I sit on a summer warmed granite rock, in the California Sierra mountains. This is my favorite type of rock; clean, hard, light colored. It was late in the development of the hot, pressure induced, liquid batholith which it grew from; it had more time to grow those lovely large crystals. Slow cooling of the original melted rock allows larger crystals of grey quartz, and pink or white feldspar, to form in a matrix, these are cut through by dikes (imagine cracks filled with another colored material that forms a discrete and interesting line through the more uniform, larger mass, of rock). Dikes arrive from an even later melt in the batholith with even larger crystals, some with a matrix of small dark, interesting things of a different chemical composition. These huge rocks where I rest, are weathered to the size of cars, buses, and palaces; a world of their own has been smoothed to a polished shine, here and there, by tons of glacier grinding past for thousands of years. I place a hand on its surface and feel my small, and very time limited, nature. Perspective. Lovely.