Saturday, June 15, 2013

Michelle V's Photos, captions, and essay

 

Admiration of a Petrified Tree


The Sleeping Stone Mammoth


Life Within a Life

 

The sun transmitted its rays, passing through pine needles, and bending around the circumference of the earth. I closed my eyes feeling the warmth, and almost feeling the earth spinning and wobbling in the celestial and eternal Journey, pulled both toward the Sun, and away from it, in the enlightened order of existence.

I opened my eyes, and listened to the gritty crunch of shoe meeting naked path on my tour of the Florissant Fossil Beds. Petrified wood attested to both the impermanence and permanence of life. Although the intelligent, enthusiastic, and keen guide projected her prose and enlightened me, the peaceful trees, both alive and petrified articulately spoke to the ancientness of the earth.

Petrified wood resounded with the timelessness of life. It looked like a statue, mottled with generous globs of copper, gold, obsidian, amber; the most exquisite creation man could never create. Time, carbon life forms, pressure, and the processes born out of the infinite intricacies of the universe created this masterpiece.

We all wore our manufactured shoes, and the man-made structures of the Florissant Fossil Beds Visitor’s Center were all well out of place. They were abnormal here. The most beautiful designer sunglasses were crude and unnatural here. The millions-of-years-old- trees, which embodied life more than my own breath attests to life, were natural here.

So I clumsily walked through the cleared trail, which all of the other temporary visitors walked, much like we all fight to leave our footprints in life. And the trees stood there, still. They were frozen, but full of testament, full of verve and life.


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