Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Ice Age pollen, disguised as dust grains—gather below the dry earth. A microscopic spark of Pleistocene time suspended in sediment that once held a mammoth’s weight. I lean closer. The specks represent something larger: spores of ancient ferns, pollen of trees and flowers, grass that swayed under skies I will never see. Each grain becomes a beat, a fragment of a living landscape resurrected in my hands. I watch hills moving like slow swells, meadows of mountain grasses, and willows standing along Grape Creek. I hear leaves sighing in wind, scented with damp earth and the coming autumn. I feel the mammoth grazing, a shadow moving through sunlight, alive and slow in the hush of prehistory. Here, hours spent with storied sediment conjure a life that sleeps only to wake in me. The past is not behind me. It is here, in the pulse of pollen, in the rustle of leaves, in the slow, sacred grazing of a creature that still walks these hills in my imagination.
By Steven Wade Veatch
 |
