So I went fossil hunting recently, a slow and muddy meditation best done before hunting season, when the river is at its lowest.
Sixty species of crinoids thrived here some 340 million years ago, when the flatland was a warm inland sea, and their stone bodies crunch underfoot along with the shale and limestone and odd bits of driftwood. They are so numerous that children collect pieces of their stems to string and wear, or stack them in patterns on fallen-tree flotsam by the shore.
After a long afternoon focused intently on the ground, the day’s finds began to grow heavy in my pack. I sat down to adjust and in comparison felt oddly light, as if these cast grey things and their history were a physical context to my own body, a gravity of geological time made visceral, the weight of accumulated millennia beginning to cramp one small and insignificant set of human shoulders.
I sat there for a long time, while hawks circled above and the river chattered as it has always done. Then without another thought, began to empty the bag into the water, returning these forms to time and the currents. The sun was setting in sharp fiery spears beyond the trees, before disappearing seconds later to drop the valley into a sublime dusk blue. And with empty hands I remembered that I too am some brief blazing thing, as is all of human history with its feedingfuckingfighting, and for this sense of transience I am ever grateful.
Breathe. It’s always just been an eyeblink.
*
(Video is fifty-five seconds of ASMR over calibrated brown noise.)