Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,
play a song for me
I'm not sleepy
and there ain't no place I'm goin' to
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,
play a song for me
In the jingle jangle morning,
I'll come followin' you
Take me for a trip upon
your magic swirling ship
All my senses have been stripped
And my hands can't feel to grip
And my toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin'
I'm ready to go anywhere,
I'm ready for to fade
Unto my own parade
Cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it
Come to the edge.
We Might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE
And they came,
and he pushed,
and they flew.
The canyonlands country. Somewhere along the Colorado I believe.
My walks in these areas brought me into realization of the immensity of deep time. A million years is just a few feet of rock. See the different layers? They are all great changes in the whole world: seas rise and fall, continents merge and subdivide, major and long-lasting climate epochs. But all those cliffs, all that sand and silt and clay, speak to long episodes of desert building up tens of thousands of feet of wind-blown sands, with a few punctuated interleaved alluvial and marine episodes. A human lifetime is about a millimeter of sand or lime stone. The earth cycled endlessly around the sun, the Sun orbited the galaxy a few times, and we see this faint echo of all that time. You can learn about all this geologic time in books, but to learn it for real, you have to walk among the time, dig for fossils, scratch at the layers.
There was a time if you asked a Grand Canyon park ranger the ages of certain colors of strata their analysis would range from a billion to three billion years. Now when you ask the same question they invite you to visit the gift shop where you can purchase books describing erosion in terms of billions of years compared to religious themed books that describe the earth as only 5,000 years old. The colors of strata and fossils were placed there by The Devil tempting you to question God’s good work of making it all happen in six days. On the 7th Day He rested. “No joke” – Joe Biden
I visited about 15 years ago and overheard visitors’ questions answered in that fashion.
The geologic time scale is truly hard to imagine …..even for geologists. Maybe 800+ million years of ‘recordable and interpretable’ record and then 2 to 4 billion before that of completely unknown history.