Our ecologies are continually telling and retelling the stories of themselves.
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This is a narrative beyond words and sounds.
It will never be imprisoned by the scratching of black lines onto white yielding paper.
This is an animate odyssey and one that is only felt after becoming fully participative within that story.
Here in the canyon ancient land surfaces reveal their history and metamorphosis through unimaginable pressures and temperatures.
Once the site of shallow seas, they were buried long before even the most distant of our ancestors set trembling foot upon the forest floor.
Within those Stygian depths, they were transformed through fire into a living geology to become the bones of this rich and vital ecology.
As they rose toward the light once more, the elemental forces of earth tipped them over like leaves in the wind.
Now exposed to the loving touch of water and root, the sand is released once more toward the ocean of its birth.
Here it will lie, layer upon gentle layer, beginning the journey back towards its form as rock.
This is a fluid vista and one in constant motion. We see it as freeze frame for a split second in its long history.
It is not thus a passive view, it is rather an animated dynamism and the continuation of that greatest of all explosions at the beginning of time.
This is one hoop within the great wheel of life.
Photo: Plunge pool in the Canuto. Courtesy of the author.
