A Liturgy of Deep Time
For being older than memory or
myth.
For giving up a hidden history,
layer upon layer.
For recording the silent closing
of a vanished sea.
For marking the unconformity of
time itself.
For the slow-moving magma that
cooled miles beneath the surface,
forming the crystalline foundation
of continents.
For bearing the stress of mountain
building,
and teaching the craton[1]
how to endure.
Exposed, rocks stand against relentless
weather,
yielding only to the slow
insistence of wind, rain, and ice,
and then erosion claims the rock rubble.
For the igneous birth in the
furnace of the rift.
For sedimentary strata laid down
in silence.
For the metamorphic weight that pressures
and heats
old rock until it forgets what it
was.
For echoing the violence of
volcanic eruptions.
For gold that rose with
superheated water and hid itself in veins of ore.
For hosting the silent, reflective
fire of the geode’s heart.
For keeping secrets deep in
solution caverns,
where calcite drips down stalactites
slowly over centuries.
For holding the liquid memory of
the sun and ancient plants
within the oil locked in shale.
For marking where glaciers melted and
shed their stony drift.
For erratics—those displaced giant
boulders dropped by vanishing ice.
For the frozen silt and sand that
holds the weight of the mammoth’s grave.
For the hunter’s chert to make a
sharp edge.
For anchoring our small and
wandering steps
on a ground that was here before us,
that will be here long after —
indifferent, patient,
still becoming.
By Steven Wade Veatch
What rocks are for. Image generated by S. W. Veatch using ChatGPT.
[1] A
craton is an ancient, stable part of the Earth's continental crust that has
survived tectonic plate activity and mountain-building processes for billions
of years.
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