It doesn't take long here to get a renewed sense of what it means to be alive, to exist...and to connect. Watches become meaningless. Mealtime is determined by the clock of our hunger (going further back in history, mealtime might be determined by the clock of food availability). Cycles of nature become our clocks, especially the rising and setting of the Sun. Relationship and interdependence become more apparent. The senses become more aware of surroundings. The deafening noise of humankind is left behind and all of a sudden one can hear things rarely heard...or heard never before. It's as if the volume of an overbearing program is suddenly turned down. At first, there is only silence, until you begin to hear those other voices that are always there, just softer and quieter. Same goes with touch and sight, as when the eyes adapt to the darkness of night. The normally dim universe brightens and expands. Whole other worlds appear. And as for that most subtle sense we call intuition. Well, you can guess what happens there too.
The Carboniferous has become for me a second home. Even when I am not here in the high desert I spend much of my days wandering about this time period in a rock layer called the Fountain Formation, a landform widely seen in the Garden of the Gods and known the world over as Red Rocks, home to that most singular amphitheatre revered by every major band and concertgoer. So though you may not be a geologist, or ever traveled here yourself, there's a good chance you know what I'm talking about. Connections.Time. Place. How very connected we all are to the Carboniferous. How our own time depends on that time. How our place is, in fact, the same place. Whether I'm wandering the Fountain Formation or the Honaker Trail Formation, strolling the Garden of the Gods or rolling at Red Rocks, I am living in the same place of the Carboniferous, just a different time. Sure, it's 300 million years later. And yes, thank goodness, the centipedes are no longer 3 feet long and giant shovel-mouthed amphibians can no longer swallow us in a simple gulp like they once did to our reptilioid forebears. And it's true, challenging as it is to live in this high desert, I'd much rather be here than in those steamy, muggy, smelly swamps for which the Carboniferous is famous.
Contrasts and connections and clarify...
Shadows call to mind other dimensions...
Yes, this place is paradise...
Reflections abound...
Words ultimately fail...
