Among the many nice salvations of my childhood have been the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our subsequent door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry of Surroundings and Water. I spent lengthy hours casting amethyst refractions on the ceiling, carving phrases into the reducing board with a shard of obsidian, seeing alien oceans and clouds in an orb of agate, feeling in my small bones the just about insufferable fantastic thing about this world and the dimensions of time. I hadn’t been alive a decade, and I used to be holding hundreds of thousands of years in my palm.
Half a lifetime later, I coped with heartbreak by traversing a landmass to go reside alone in the midst of an old-growth forest. Every day I walked the identical trails for hours, attempting to make a brand new path by means of life between the ferns and the emotions. Because the weeks unspooled into months, time did what it at all times does and I started therapeutic.
At some point on my common afternoon stroll, my eye fell upon a small heart-shaped stone. That’s the way it started: I all of a sudden began seeing them in every single place — quarry of hearts strewing the as soon as clean trails. Every day I crammed my pockets with them, took them house, and painted them gold. I purchased a classic typesetter’s drawer, hung it on the wall, and positioned a small stone coronary heart in every compartment.
Given my views on omens and the character of the universe, I didn’t take them as indicators. I took them as affirmation that we’re pattern-seeking animals and makers of which means who kind search photos of what we’re on the lookout for after which discover it because it rises out of the vastness of actuality by the fulcrum of the thoughts. (This may endanger the lifetime of the center, for we frequently carry an unconscious search picture of a damaged mannequin of affection, which we then discover within the relationships we search out.)
The present of the stone hearts was one thing else fully: They helped me really feel what is difficult to fathom — scales of area and time too huge for the thoughts to carry, but vital for calibrating our transient existence and its fleeting tremors of the center. They helped me keep in mind that if time can change the form of even a rock, it will probably change the form of a life.
These existential undertones of stones permeate Turning to Stone: Discovering the Refined Knowledge of Rocks (public library) by geologist Marcia Bjornerud — half memoir, half portal of science, half love letter to rocks as “raconteurs, companions, mentors, oracles, and sources of existential reassurance,” lensed by means of the science and marvel of specific rocks which have made our planet a world, from acquainted pillars of civilization like granite and flint to molecular marvels like dolomite and diamictite.
At a time when subatomic colliders are looking for the “God particle” and area telescopes are peering into the start of time, amid cosmological ideas too summary and scales too immense for us to totally grasp, Bjornerud celebrates stone as a manner of anchoring ourselves in our planetary inheritance, inseparable from our cosmic origins but intimate and alive. (We now know that rocks might maintain the important thing to the origin of life.) She writes:
Geology, with its concentrate on tangible data of the distant previous, affords a bridge between human experiences of the world and the awe-inspiring however chilly and formidable vacancy of area. Studying to learn the storylines of Earth’s historical past straight from rocks — understanding the plots and protagonists that formed the locations the place we reside — can assist to offer a sense of “embeddedness” within the cosmos, a way of continuity and kinship with previous and future. Maybe probably the most distinctive attribute of geologic considering is the follow of roaming freely throughout many scales in area and time. In doing so, we will see ourselves in miniature, a part of an extended lineage of creatures on a inventive planet that has renewed itself for greater than 4 billion years whereas protecting an idiosyncratic diary of its actions over time within the type of rocks.
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Growing a collective sense of ourselves as Earthlings — native inhabitants of an previous, sturdy planet — might deliver reassurance in a time when so many human methods that when appeared strong are exhibiting indicators of fragility.
Epochs in the past, after we have been first fathoming the character of the universe and our place in it, Johannes Kepler — who devised his revolutionary legal guidelines of planetary movement whereas defending his mom in a witchcraft trial — was ridiculed for seeing the Earth as an ensouled physique that has digestion, that suffers sickness, that inhales and exhales like a dwelling organism. 1 / 4 millennium later, the younger German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel gave scientific form to that perception in coining the phrase ecology, which remained an obscure tutorial time period till Rachel Carson made it a family phrase with Silent Spring a century later. A technology after Carson insisted that “our origins are of the earth, and so there may be in us a deeply seated response to the pure universe, which is a part of our humanity,” Bjornerud vindicates Kepler and, with an eye fixed to panpsychism, considers the rehumanizing energy of referring to the stony physique of the world:
We’re creatures formed by the planet’s rocky logic. Every of us is, most basically, an Earthling. On the seaside, pebbles of Ordovician dolomite prattle with Archean granite, their mixed recollections spanning half the age of the Earth.
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Rocks guarantee us that the previous isn’t any much less actual than the current. I spot a walnut-size piece of porphyritic basalt — one of many “Chinese language calligraphy” stones my sister and I collected in childhood. I thank it for revealing itself to me and slip it into my pocket. The stones are speaking with each other, with the waves and wind, with my feverish mind. A current concept of consciousness posits that clever consciousness can emerge when the parts of a giant system have a sure degree of interconnectivity. Neurons within the human mind attain the crucial threshold. Within the presence of those chattering cobbles, it appears apparent to me that, based on that definition, Earth is hyperconscious.
Couple Turning to Stone with A Stone Is a Story — a picture-book about geology as a portal to deep time — then revisit Robert Macfarlane’s magnificent Underland.
