The Geology of Time

Death Valley is the largest national park in the contiguous United States. Roughly speaking, it's a valley running 150 miles long, with many other spurs off its sides. It's home to the lowest spot in the northern hemisphere -- Badwater, at almost 300 feet below sea level -- and a place where average summer temperatures are 115 degrees.

It's also a place where humans build things. From mines, to little pieces of art like this.

In the 1920s, people even built this wonderful oasis . . . the Furnace Creek Inn.

Which is where you will find date palms and pomegranate trees.

And even water lilies.

All of which stand in absolute, stark contrast to the vast, unyielding, rest-ness of what else you'll find in Death Valley, when you are lucky enough to make a trek there.

You will find unending vistas of Mother Earth in her absolutely naked state.

Showing all of her colors.

And that of sister sky.

No matter how long you look, how many times a day you stare while you are there, you cannot get over the blue, the grey, the every-shade-of-brown that glows back at you.

And the quiet that envelopes you.

And the distinctly un-earthly sense that you are in a gigantic bowl of geologic time. You are one teeny tiny speck in this gigantic valley that is home to rocks which are almost two billion years old. And in a place where the focus and shapes keep shifting.

One moment, you are in a moon-scape.

And the next, you are bathing in a russet and buckskin sunset.

Back to the moon.

Back to the russet and buckskin, rippling like waves across the earth . . . in ground that been migrating from the equator since it was the floor of a tropical sea 600 million years ago. Of course, you cannot see it moving. We are talking about geologic time. But even standing stock still, those stripes of glorious dirt and rock look more full of potential, energy and gravitas that most of us humans could ever muster.

And really, that is the bottom line of what you feel when you are out there, spending time at the bottom of the northern hemisphere: the earth rules, and our own time on it is virtually insignificant.

We, all of us, are but a blip on the screen of this whole thing. Whatever "this whole thing" is -- everyone's opinion of it is different. And definitions of it, or agreement upon it, don't matter here.

Indeed, that is the point: that it does not matter.

IN THE BEST WAY!!!!

When you are soaking up rocks and sky and light and dirt the age of which you cannot even wrap your brain around, you realize that all of the things that you worry about are not so very important in the very gigantic bigger scheme of things that are so much bigger than you are.

When you comprehend that the whole thing is too big to comprehend, you get free.

Not that we won't worry any more, or make plans, or have hopes and dreams and still be responsible. It's not a stupid kind of free. It's a glorious kind of free.

If you are but a blip . . . or, really, a dot on a spot on a blip of a blip . . . you don't have to be so darned serious about "getting it right" -- whatever "right" might be. You get free. You can play around more. Experiment. See what will happen.

Conversely and ironically, it also matters THAT you try, play, experiment, be your most "you." That your own molecules got arranged to become you -- in this vast oh so vast expanse of time -- means to me that you should not waste your you-ness. Heck no. Those molecules are saying, "We're here! Now, go for it!!!"

Here's hoping we all will keep becoming more and more of who -- of WHAT -- we are. Your molecules -- blip-like, infinitesimal though they are, in the world of this world's mind-blowing time -- are ready to put all their potential, energy and gravitas to work. Go for it!!!