My hand rests on warm stone between sparse rashes of black and orange lichen, and I am overcome with something I can't place. I'm on the side of a busy road on what feels like the other end of the world and I hold back tears brought on by a wall of rock.
I trace the seam, an overhang formed at the junction of sedimentary and metamorphic stone and I know that hundreds of millions of years are missing from this little nook, a foot above my head.
It is the Great Unconformity. In some places, more than a billion years of geologic history is missing. Some weathering process scraped away all of that stone, profoundly changing the landscape before the carved earth was buried again.
My fingers brush stone hundreds of millions of years younger than the rock my palm rests on. It's just a pit stop on the road trip home, but I feel the way many must when they enter a church. I want to kneel before the enormity of the time that is expressed in just the width of my hand and take all day to read the patterns of sedimentation like a wordless holy text.
I find comfort in this physical expression of the vastness of time. I believe people are a lot like stone. While we may be formed differently, we are all subject to change at the hands of each other and forces beyond our control. We may be weathered or metamorphosed or concreted, but exposure to the world grinds all things to dust eventually-- dust that forms its own new stone with faint traces of its original parts.
In times of great change, I am brought back to this roadside where I touched so much missing time. Whatever cataclysmic event took those strata ended, and the world kept turning.
After all, what is my upheaval compared to what the granite just beneath that ledge saw? And yet it's still there, just as the rock that was ground away is still there in the sediment above its original place. It is still identifiable minerals in a little tray under the microscope.
Good upheaval is still upheaval, and I know that the dust of change will settle into something solid again.
