Reading Deep Time in Stone

Geological time is almost impossible to feel. Millions of years is a number, not a sensation. And yet certain objects make it briefly legible.

An ammonite is an animal that swam ancient seas and vanished with the dinosaurs. Fossil limestone is a sea floor, stood upright on a shelf. Both make spans of time that resist imagination suddenly visible.

To keep one of these is to keep a piece of deep time close - an object that quietly re-scales the anxieties of a single day.

This is not mysticism. It is simply perspective, made physical.