Winter Solstice. It’s an ending and a beginning. A point in time and a repeating. At the crux of an old year and a new one, a journey around the sun both familiar and yet unfamiliar. Imagine 4.5 billion years. This is about how many times the Earth has been around the sun. Our piece of it as humans is so small.
This past summer one of my sisters and I had the privilege of visiting the island of Newfoundland off the east coast of Canada. We hiked the east and west coasts and many points in between. The island is a place of contrasts. Boreal forest surrounded by ocean. Northern latitudes where Partridge berries* and bakeapple+ and semi-tropical rhododendron grow side by side. As islands go, it’s big. Count on at least twelve hours driving from L’Anse aux Meadows (where the Vikings first came) on the Great Northern Peninsula to the city of St. John’s.
Newfoundlanders are fond of calling their big island, “The Rock.” There is very little top soil anywhere, yet they love their gardens, rocky soil and all, and their root cellars. It’s not uncommon for people to use the ditches on either side of road to grow their vegetables. It’s here too that the northeast corner of the Appalachians, the oldest mountains in North America, emerge from the ocean floor. Where glaciers have cut fjords into the land and time has changed them from saltwater to fresh water lakes.
The island is built on Cambrian rock five hundred million years old. And in some places, like the Tablelands at Gros Morne, the earth’s dark green mantle has pushed through and oxidized into an eerie rusty orange, a kind of moonscape telling the tale of plate tectonics, the formation of continents and mountain ranges.
Geology comes from the Greek word for “earth” and “speech” or “word.” In other words, geology is earth talk or the story of the earth. The Desert Mothers and Fathers who lived in the deserts of Egypt in the 3rd century of the common era, often spoke of reading the Book of Creation. Creation was their everyday bible, their Divine Word. In some Indigenous cultures, rocks are honoured as grandfathers because they are old and hold stories.
That’s how I felt encountering Green Point on the west coast for the first time, where the Cambrian Period moves into the Ordovician. One of those places on the Earth where the connection is primal. Being in the presence of, being close to the beginning of everything, the beginning of time. So many ancestors, their stories flung out like a scroll across the ocean shore, telling of other oceans, other species, other continents, other times. A glimpse into the Earth’s many changes, restructurings, sheddings and reformations. The way time builds layers, leaves a seam stitched and a trail. Leaves a story. The layers revealing the first signs of complex life, life forms long extinct and others adapted, evolved. Still others, like ours, geologically and spiritually speaking, just emerging.
This photograph of my sister among the rocks captures how I felt about that moment at Green Point: Curiosity. Awe. But especially, humility (of the soil; of the earth). A context for all the changes I might live as an individual and the world’s changes in my lifetime and beyond. The realization that our time as humans on this planet is so fleeting, so recent. The land, so powerful. The miracle that is this Earth home. If we just listen to her story.
* low bush cranberry
+ cloud berry
