One recent day,
as I periodically feel the need to do, I revisited the Age of Glaciers Monument
in the small NE Kansas town of Blue Rapids.
Some 10-11,000 years before the present (YBP) the last glacial sheet
melted its way north out of Kansas.
Fossil evidence shows that several large mammals, including both
mastodon and mammoth, roamed the Midwest during that time. Archeological evidence suggests that Paleo-Indians
lived in Kansas by that time and hunted, among other animals, those giant
elephantine forms.
The basic reason
for my revisits is a particular type of stone:
Sioux quartzite. I needed to read
again that the large pieces of this stone, scoured out and dragged by the last
glacier from SW Minnesota and found scattered across the landscape as far south
as the glaciated NE corner of Kansas, are at least 1.5 billion years
old. This quartzite, a type of
metamorphic rock formed from sandstone under great heat and pressure at
geologic depth, began with ancient riverbed sand deposits.
I grew up
encountering those large, roughly spherical chunks of quartzite scattered
across my home county of Pottawatomie that lies just to the SE of Blue
Rapids. Some chunks of this
reddish-brown, very dense and resistant stone are 5-6 feet in diameter. Standing next to one of these large stones, I
feel jelly fish fragile and utterly temporary.
Oldest Rocks in Kansas
Why does whatever
metaphysical plan that may exist even bother with the mortal, and tenuous,
human stage of development? Is it (to
use poet Maxine Kumin’s term) that our “Ground Time” here is a period of
testing to determine what sort of placement we will earn in the spirit world?
Or is the
appearance of humans on this planet just the result of contingencies, a
position fervently argued by Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist
and student of evolutionary theory? Did
our line persist and develop to its present stage due to a string of unplanned
mutations and happenstances in the struggles, the gives and takes, the triumphs
and losses of organisms during the eons of life on Earth? Did we become the dominant species by a
series of unplanned rolls of the dice?
Or, to look at
Sioux quartzite in another way, was this stone shown to us as another potent
lesson about time? About how, looking at
that ancient rock, we must be moved to admit that, in spite of our thus far
short Ground Time here, we, recklessly, have done great harm to the Mother
Earth that sustains us?
About how we
humans have a finite amount of time—a non-renewable resource—at our disposal to
turn around our collective lifestyle; about how, given our penchant for habitat
destruction, and if humans are to have that significant Ground Time here, we
must learn to not wait, as we tend to do, until it is almost too late; about
how we must learn to live in a state of mutualism with our Earth?
About how we must
desist from viewing our Earth as something evil, as something we must conquer
and control? (Being evil is not the same
as being dangerous.) About how we must
accept that we are part of the biological and physical worlds that swirl both
around and within each of us? About how
we must learn to both cherish and to become persistent allies of the fragile
crust of Spaceship Earth? About how our
interactions with our planet must be done with the grace of the good
neighbor: the patient gardener with the
long view, living a blessed lifestyle known as “reciprocity?”
I study the small piece of quartzite on my shelf—and I
wonder.
RiverSoul
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