Being Alive
Big Bend drives me to silence. All I want to do, when I’m there, is to look at the landscapes as they stretch out around me and confront the enormity of time and think about all the lifetimes it took to get from there to here. After all, it’s a land that once sat at the bottom of a sea that first formed 100 million years ago, then became pocked marked with raging volcanoes 40 million years ago, then went quiet to let wind, rivers, and rain carve the landscape into its present form, one grain of sand at a time. It’s a lovely, slow-moving panorama.
I am amazed when I’m there, and sometimes it even makes me laugh. I recall visits to England to see 700-year-old churches, marveling at their age, I think about my country celebrating 250 years of existence as if it’s a big deal in the history of empires, and I think of me turning 80, old for my kind. In their categories, they all seem significant. But drop any of them into the life of the Big Bend and they disappear without a whisper and become blips too small to even measure. They become heartbeats or blinks of an eye.
The presence of all that time is sobering, especially when I throw in the sky and the stars above while sitting by the dead volcanoes and know that despite its age, the earth itself is simply a small part of a universe that’s been chugging along for billions of years. Perspective is a daunting thing but trying to get in step with the march of time, is a great way to slow down and feel what it truly means to be alive.