Thursday, May 07, 2009

Some days diamonds..Some days rocks.

I don't think I've ever once written about my little side hobby of seeking out indigenous rocks and fossils,wherever I happen to find myself living at the time.

From the mountains,to the desert,to the shore,..there's always something you can retrieve from the earth that has been sitting there since before humans crawled out of the caves,and learned to divine the seasons from the length of the solar day, harvest wheat,..and build freeways.

Scraping around in the dirt,and coming up with an egg-shaped geode filled with tiny crystals of Amethyst is like a journey to creation,on a manageable scale.

Scouring the rocky hillsides of Western Colorado after a rainstorm can yield Ammonites,and Trilobites,and fossilized leaves that ran the entire course of their existence,while our ancestors were still sequestered in their damp burrows, against the predatory primeval night.

Digging around a broken sprinkler valve in O-Town,might even turn up a curiously patterned stone such as this!..


Continents may drift,ecosystems will flourish and fall.
Often,I wonder if time would pass at all if it weren't for the stubborness of humans,determined to syncronize and categorize the whole of existence around those things we can only touch,and feel,and see right in front of our noses.

I turned the stone over,and confirmed my suspicion that the very spot upon which I stood was once the bottom of a great sea.

'Where things that crawl or swim or fly,
..eat and breed,..and live,..and die'..

And in their time,..their place in the scheme of things,..everything revolved around them.


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15 Comments:

At 5:54 PM , Blogger Mom said...

I love pondering what things were like in the long ago. Finding tangible evidence of long ago times is like touching eternity. In this part of the world we often find ancient sharks teeth along the shore of what was once a vast ocean.

 
At 7:18 PM , Blogger booda baby said...

What a thrill! 5,000 years of evolution in O-Town.

You must have a big collection of your finds? Can we see pictures?

Leezer, who visits my blog, found a dinosaur tooth when she was little. I find pebbles in my shoes. :(

 
At 10:28 PM , Blogger Lorraine said...

Shut. The. Hell. Up.

Seriously, seriously awesome.

Do you know that when I travel the thing I am most wont to do is take organic bits from the place where I was as a keepsake. I have pebbles from London and snail shells from France and also the first rock my child ever brought me. Plus, when other people go places and ask what they can bring me I say "dirt" and that accounts for the dirt from Rome and Aberdeen and such like that.

I got it from my mom.

 
At 6:49 AM , Blogger billy pilgrim said...

my kid is in the mineral racket. he's got some killer core samples.

 
At 8:28 AM , Blogger sageweb said...

Very cool, you should call the O'town paper, you could be famous, this is a spectacular fine. ALthough if Jesus' image was in the rock you could have sold it on ebay.

 
At 8:45 AM , Blogger Sling said...

Mom- It's the pondering thing I enjoy.
Holding something that once lived millenia ago,and knowing you're the first person to see it is pretty fun. :)

Bood Babe- Sadly,I left all my personal possesions behind when I got sentenced to Corrections.
It took my brothers all of about 2 minutes to sell everything I owned.
..and HEY!..You live in Santa Barbara!..
Take a close look at the cliff faces,or examine a handful of beach sand,and you're bound to find some evidence of sea creatures from times gone by.

Rainey- I'll take a small jar of dirt over a T-Shirt any day!
I like that The Child gave you a rock.
It must have struck her fancy,and she wanted to give you a treasure!..Cool. :)

Billy P.- I'm envious!..I bet he has some nice specimens.
Whenever I get to a museum I spend a whole lotta time checking out the Gems and Mineral collections.

 
At 8:51 AM , Blogger Sling said...

Sage- Truly,these kind of things aren't really uncommon..might be worth a couple bucks at a yard sale.
The coolest thing I ever found was an Ammonite about 8 inches long,with beautiful color and detail.
It was uncovered after a rainstorm in my very own backyard in Delta,Colorado.

 
At 2:27 PM , Blogger yellowdoggranny said...

oh how cool is that..I like to collect rocks and stuff too..i still have a piece of driftwood that i found on the beach in calif. from 1960...i swear to goddess...

 
At 2:55 PM , Blogger Random Thinker said...

Collecting rocks must be pretty common. I have a collection of rocks, not pebbles, big honking rocks, from all the cool car trips we have gone on over the years. I keep them in front of the fireplace, which is starting to resemble a quarry.

 
At 4:42 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's a fantastic fossil. We had some big roacks at teh old house with fossils in them. I bring back roack and sheels from every place I visit.

 
At 7:22 PM , Blogger Sling said...

Yellerdawg- You can find all kinds of treasures beachcombing..Used to be,back in the 60's,there were tide pools everywhere you went.
Today,not so much.

Thinker- We just can't escape our stone age roots.
I mean that seriously.
Like,maybe we're hardwired to collect rocks for their potential as tools or something.
..I just don't know.

Citizen- I think those make perfect souvenirs of the places we've been!

 
At 12:17 AM , Blogger yellowdoggranny said...

u won an award..check out my blog..js

 
At 12:43 AM , Blogger Middle Child said...

Wow. This is right up my street..."curiouser and curiouser"
I have been hooked on collecting ricks etc since about 13...I had a fossilised fish rock for a long time till it disapeared in a move

It is so excitingly interesting to consider the past...the ages past...back to..what??? and here we are looking at it...ahh...I love this rock stuff too

 
At 5:48 PM , Blogger Miss Healthypants said...

That is so cool!! :)

Iwanski and I are really into rocks, too--when we visited Lake Superior last summer, it was too cold to swim, so we sat in the shallow part of the lake and collected rocks. It is fascinating to think about how long some of them have been there and where they came from.

 
At 8:34 PM , Blogger Middle Child said...

Hmmmm I meant collecting "rocks" and ricks as well... meant to add don't ever take a rock if ever on Ayre's Rock (now called uluru or something)...most people who do have seriously bad things happen to them and they are posted back from all over the world...and thats the truth...

 

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