Metamorphic rocks develop so slowly, and yet the interface between them can be microscopically thin. The incongruity of time and space in geology is amazing.
Then something sudden happened like a crack or a flood, and the rock is left looking like it really should be two separate rocks.
Something like that happens with countries, too. Ethnicity develops slowly, organically, and then there is an invasion or a political crisis. The result is a Belgium or a Yugoslavia. Or an Iraq.
In one area I noticed glints bejeweling otherwise uninteresting rocks. Perhaps it was mica. It was amusing to make the morning sun produce the maximum reflection.
Brilliance surrounded by normalcy and mundaneness. Rocks share this with human history. So few of the centuries of our own civilization were brilliant.
This twisted goat face reminds me of something I saw once. Was it a Georgia O'Keefe painting?
What do readers really think when I rant against postcards of pretty desert wildflowers? Since not that many readers comment on this blog I have to imagine what the reader is thinking. Maybe they think this indifference to color is just a guy thing, and laugh me off.
But on this ride I actually fluttered my eyelashes over a combination of colors, or was it a similarity of colors in radically different materials?
Perhaps it reminded me of the goddess of Leadville.
Later on that mountain bike ride I noticed green plants growing in straight lines. It stopped me dead in my tracks. There aren't many straight lines in the landscape--only eroded shorelines of ancient seas, and cracks in rocks. What would inspire green plants to express the quality of Linearity?
Earlier in the same area, I had noticed veins or streaks of quartz-like rocks coming right to the surface. In fact they were right underneath the mountain bike at that moment. The lines of green plants were collinear extensions of them. Presumably the nutrition of the soil was different near these rock veins.
Two completely different materials, green plants and rock veins. Should we visualize them as representations (to please Schopenhauer) of a Platonic Form, Linearity?
But I prefer to think of this vein of rock, morphing into a line of green, as a snapshot of the Great Drama of a billion years of evolution: rock, gases and solar energy became Life, in just a few strides underneath my bike.
