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.

A slice of petrified wood is a tree that stood over two hundred million years ago, its cells replaced one by one with silica. 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.

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.