every five years or so i look back on my life and i have a good laugh

[kaberett]

-- or, better: every now and then, I'll be merrily getting on with handling some "recent", "young" rocks, and then I will stop and think holy shit, this thing I am holding is sixty-five million years old. Or I'll remember the first-year lecture where JJ stood at the front of the hall, tossing a piece of rock in the air casually, before coming out with, "I'm holding a piece of the mantle in my hand - and it's green."

xkcd's not wrong.

I manage to keep the sense of awe and wonder on the occasions I'm lucky enough to be in the same room as pieces of meteorite that predate the Earth, or in rocks that actual people have actually brought back from the Moon, but it's a little harder to remember in my day-to-day dealings.

Only then I do, and my mind gets blown all over again.

(Probably some of this is because, in chemistry - I used to be a chemist - femtoseconds can be a long time, and navigating the tension between timescales when I was studying geology and chemistry in parallel was... rather interesting. And yet here I am, and here the Earth is, and I can lie down on the ground with my shoulders against the earth and I can feel - I am surrounded by - my subject of study, my love. There's a reason I've got this icon of Toph. Now I walk in beauty, indeed.)

Comments

[jamfish]

I love this post. And Earth. And earth!