stones come out of the earth

Stones come out of the earth, get broken down by mushrooms and become soil that all living things depend on from plants to caribou.

Caribou actually eat lichen right off the rocks which also helps reduce them to dirt.

From left: Fabio Silva, head of archeology and anthropology at Bournemouth University, Amanda Chadburn, visiting fellow at Bournemouth University, and Clive Ruggles, emeritus professor of archaeology and archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian

Here some scientists are setting up their instruments to measure if Stonehenge was built to honor the moon as well as the sun. Those people were the first farmers so naturally they were interested in the changing seasons and the movements of the celestial bodies and all the signs and portents which they could observe and probably thought were the actions of gods or supernatural creatures of some sort so why not honor them.

Anyways, this site is 5,000 years old so those rocks have been exposed to weathering for atleast that long. You can see how they’re wearing away - all soft and round. The lichen (which is actually half fungi and half algae) is eating into it and turning it into soil.

Eventually all that soil falls back into the ocean and travels down and sinks into the earth’s crust and eventually into the molten zone and gets spit back up again as lava thru volcanic activity. Of course that takes millions of years.

Did you know that some oil wells are 6 miles deep into the earth? Some offshore oil wells drill down 5 miles below the bottom of the ocean? Oil and it’s derivatives are called ‘fossil fuels’ - guess why? Because they used to be living plants and animals, all sorts of carbon based life forms and now they’re fossils. And now they’re buried 6 miles beneath the surface of the earth? How did that happen?

Sediment accumulation. Where did the sediment come from? Mountains. Where did the mountains come from? They were forced up by colliding continental plates. The Himalayas are the result of the collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian plate. Those two crusts bring up rocks from deep within the earth as they build the mountains.

Mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Rockies are relatively young (60 million years old) and still growing, they’re very high and very rocky, but other mountain ranges, like the Appalachians (400 million years old), have risen and worn away over time. Geologists tell us that there are many mountain ranges on earth that have risen and worn away to the point where they don’t exist anymore. You’d have to dig into the earth to find them.

Looks like a loop to me. Recycling from the ground up. Grinding the rock into sediment, burying the sediment, cycling it underground until it sprouts up again for another round. This process has been going on as far back as there is a preserved geologic record - about 4 billion years.

It’s elegant and profound. Our living world casting off its clothes like a worn out suit just to put on a new one made of recycled fabric, with alot of new wrinkles. It’s like a giant blender if you are fond of making smoothies like I am. The blender blades curve upward and whatever is at the bottom: banana, frozen mangoes, blue berries gets macerated and thrown to the top, mixed in with everything else until it’s homogenous. Sort of like earth’s mantle.

Here’s a picture I found on the internet.

I’m not a geologist. I’m just a big admirer of our earth. It’s magnificent and unique in so many ways. It’s alive. You can feel it. The sky breeze makes the trees dance and the leaves laugh. The sweet dirt grows things. Big things, little things - all kinds of things. It harbors microbes by the skadzillions (that’s 1 with 54 zeroes). It’s a home and a habitat. It adapts and re-balances itself when it needs to and takes care of it’s residents as if it were a a good landlord, or . . . a mother? Our friend the fungi live in there. Without fungi we wouldn’t probly have any soil at all. They were the original weatherers and decomposers of rocks back when the earth was new. They crawled out of the ocean (so to say), evolved into land based fungi and started up the cycle. Thank you.

This earth is alive alright but, like many of the species in its biosphere, its concern is with the preservation of the whole, not any specific individual or species. Many species have gone extinct over the ages and many more are going extinct today (unfortunately) but the biosphere remains intact. It’s known as Mother Earth, Pachamama, Isis, Enlil, Gaia, Terra and many other names in many other cultures. She is the mother of all the creatures and all the critters, all the flying ones and the crawling ones, the swimming ones and the walking ones. She is mother of us all, in the mythology of the humans.

Stones come out of the earth and fall back in. So do stories. So do entire cultures and nations. So do we. Wow, this is getting profound.

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