To My Mineral Ancestors

 I like nature.  I find a great deal of peace when I'm connecting with natural things.  Much of the time this is as simple and common as listening - with my eyes closed - to the birds in the orange trees surrounding my little backyard patio or the waves susurring on the beach.  These noises help me relax and connect.  They allow me to focus on something besides my own deranged thoughts.

I was fortunate to be able to take a trip that plopped me in Antarctica.  If you want to feel small and young and transient, a mote of dust in a scirocco, one breath in ten thousand years worth of breaths, go to the Antarctic.  The continent of Antarctica is the driest desert on earth - the Sahara, the Great Outback, the Mojave all get more precipitation than Antarctica.  While this is mind-blogging in its own right what totally blew my mind was seeing ice that was miles thick.  I still cannot intellectually conceptualize how ten miles of ice can form in a frozen desert.  And all of it is atop rock that has been there for millions of years.  Sometimes I felt like the environment was just going to subsume me.  A "You useless speck of organica - get thee away" kind of thing.

There was a scholar on board - an anthropologist - who spoke for a bit about animism, likely the most ancient spiritual pursuit on earth and one found in many disparate indigenous cultures.  This is, as I understand it, the attribution of a life force to all things that exist, not just living things like fauna and flora.  It's less a structured religion and more a fundamental worldview that everything possesses a spiritual essence.  I spoke with him after the talk and he admitted to struggling with the idea that rocks have a life force but he was giving it a go. 

And then there's this: ice is a mineral.

I think I am going to become an animist.  Maybe a Christian animist and my mother is howling from the grave on that one.  It's easier for me to think that a bit of me is going to be absorbed into the natural world - trees and plants and animals - than to imagine that the rocks outside my front window are having a conversation about the weather.  No matter and more to come on that one but the idea that the world, that life, is very, very big and that I am very, very insignificant was presented to me in technicolor down there in Antarctica.  It was so big that the expedition staff would point out that the mountain in front of me was ten thousand feet high and not the few thousand feet that my mind was estimating.  It was so big and the terrain was so featureless that I lost all perspective.

See ya.  I gotta go talk to some rocks.