Formation

I can not escape the impermanence reflected to me as each season transitions to another, from  the first wildflowers emerging to the deep silent snows of winter in which they lay dormant.  I witness hawks sending out wild screeches as they fly over my head, I hear the hooves of a hundred antelope echo in the dirt when I surprise them, and laugh to hear the coyotes yipping and worrying their prey in the foothills.  I watch the water rise each spring, flooding over banks, displacing and rearranging the creek each spring as it travels its course.  I see how the wind carves its presence into the rock, the sandstone malleable under the constant pressure of time.  I understand I am only here for a little while, how I am both prey and predator, and I see that I too am constantly changing.

Lately, I have been fascinated by the layers of earth revealed to me, the faulting and displacement of millions of years of rock surrounding me, the folding and tilting of the earth I walk through each morning.  Sandstone, granite cut through with quartz and feldspar, blocks of limestone sliding capriciously through a sea of shale.  Paleozoic, Archean, Cretaceous…rocks and formations 2.8 billion years old, the roots of our continent.  

I am awestruck to be on top of a ridge, and then ten minutes later to find myself standing on a layer of bedrock beneath it, a witness to the fragility of something whose solidity I take for granted.  Just so has my own life shifted.  Each step I take towards recognizing my own truth brings me to another layer of myself and a deeper understanding of how each event, on the timeline from the beginning to now, has contributed to my formation.