I’m sitting on the edge of a sundial made of desert stones circularly laid out to measure incremental movements of shadow.
I’m literally sitting on the edge of time.
At the back of the field station in the middle of Capitol Reef National Park in south central Utah, I sit in silence. These rocks here mark time’s passage in more ways than one. In a place like this, time is so obviously a much beastlier thing than we realize as we tick the smallest of moments away in our regular routines of waking up, getting ready, working, taking care of responsibilities, doing hobbies, playing, or even being bored. Time, with its tool belt of wind, water, and fire, has already long been at work carving, moving, and molding the ribboned rocks and rainbowed land. So long we cannot even conceptualize its workday.
Time swallows us like birds swallow gnats in a place like a red rock desert, where millions of years of Earth violence – earthquakes, volcanoes, rivers, and storms – begets the kind of awed beauty that snuffs out words delicately lit in the back of the throat, a place where humans still teeter along the edges of what was broken so many eons ago, and in whose remaining pockets we often take refuge.
The powers of earth and sky dwarf us; they move with or without our consent, or even sometimes our awareness.
We. Are. Puny.
As the sun warms my back this golden afternoon, I offer a simple supplication: May the forces of destruction in our lives likewise, somehow, bring us beauty and refuge in the end.
A woodpecker sounds in the distance. A wind rustles the juniper trees and pinion pines. Tiny insects investigate me like zealous detectives: Who are you among these citizens of nature, the flora and fauna that arrived here first and that, unlike many of your kind, always abide the ecological laws of the land?
What am I doing here? What are we doing here? What are we humans doing arrogantly, destructively, tromping around like kings on land that can merely blink and miss the rise and fall of entire nations? Who are we to be so proud in the face of all-consuming Time?
And yet, as a spiritual person, I am reminded of two things.
I was once told a Native American story about how God, when placing humans on the Earth and seeing them immediately turn to cruelty and meanness in the day, threw a blanket of darkness over everything. But a little bird, heart-stricken at being separated from God, flew up high, high, high in the blanketed sky and started poking holes with her beak to let in the light and to remind people from where and what they had come, and to be good.
I am also reminded of Elijah’s experience with God and nature in the Old Testament:
And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19: 11-12)
This may be land forged by ancient demigods of nature, whose wild abandoned playground we walk upon, but our roars and the echoes of theirs are still found lacking in the breadth of real power.
Last night as I laid out flat on the ground, arms open to the night sky, searching the gorgeous perforated, pinholed scope of the heavens in silence, I felt something call out, uncomplicated and still: “We love you. We love you.” Tears streamed down from the corners of my eyes. I wanted to fly like the heart-stricken little bird up, up, up to tear down the fabric that so often muffles this message from the Gods, the universe, or the intelligence in every single element – whatever you want to call it. The shroud that can make it so hard for us to hear the message – at once both personal and global – seemed piercingly clear: We are simply adored.
We. Are. Adored.
I watch as the slow descent in the afternoon sun shifts the shadowy line to another stone – another tick in this earthen clock.
As gnat-like and proudly injurious as we comparatively and paradoxically are, humans are also incredibly beautiful, remarkable, loving, creative beings, capable even of calling down divinity to these relics upon which we tread, relics left behind in the wake of the destructive play of nature’s demigods. But more often than we realize, the last of those ancient demigods – Time – and the voices of little ones like tiny, dedicated, and wise birds teach and remind us all that we humbly and reverently sit on the edges of things much, much larger and grander than ourselves.
That ought to nudge the gentle out of us more often.