In the Beginning

It all begins with geology. I stare at the frozen snow and see how it is carved by the wind and shaped by the change in temperature. I read the layers of this winter's storms in the changing textures of the ice crystals. It resembles the lay of land. It is a microcosm of the earth.
It all begins with geology. The ancient stories are written in the rocks and the shape of the landscape. 4.6 billion years of stories. Languages lost and folded upon each other. Frozen and scorched. Fluid and solid. Spewed into the sky and forced into the depths of the magma that underlies the ground we stand on. Mountains rising and disappearing. Oceans closing. Continents colliding and sinking. This is the story of Earth.
I try to grasp my own insignificance in the face of all this. I think of the way that John McPhee decribes it as I look at my hand. "With your arms spread wide to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins at the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file, you could eradicate human history."
I break it down as I gaze at my outstretched arm towards my right fingertips. This is all the Pre-Cambrian geological period. In this period, the oldest algae fossils appeared three billion years ago. The first signs of life. The oldest rocks on earth are somewhere near 3.8 billion years old, and the moon rocks 4 billion. The oldest rocks in the Berkshires are a mere one billion, probably around the elbow of my left arm. As I work my gaze down to my wrist, time compresses. Animals appear in abundance, mountains rise and erode, and the dinosaurs disappear just as the fingers of my left hand branch out 250,000 years ago. And still life changes. The land changes. And still there are no humans. The ice ages that have scarred the surface of the land that we see today emerge in the period represented by my nails. And still there are no humans. In all of the outstretched topography of my arms that represents the history of this planet, there are no humans. Not until the very outer edge of my finger nails do we walk the earth.
I think about it, and I think about global climate change and how, yes, we may extinguish life as we know it, but we will not extinguish life, and we will not extinguish the earth. We are just one small speck in the gigantic spectrum that is held in the stories of the stones.
It all begins and ends with geology.