Recently I was in Ohio for the memorial service for my best friend of 65 years. It was a beautiful, soulful time of remembrance and reunion. Bruce and I had a lot in common, and one fascination we shared was with fossils, which abounded in the area around our hometown. Above is a picture of me, last weekend, searching for them behind the school we attended. Near that spot, when I was ten years old, I found the beautiful little crinoid coral flower head pictured here. Who knows how many millions of years ago it swayed in the current at the bottom of an ocean?
Now, I’m the old fossil, a relic left behind by my friend who preceded me into the great sea of eternity.
And that’s okay. Poking around for fossils reminds me of the true place of us humans in the grand scheme of the cosmos. The human era on earth is but a blip in geologic time. Will we be but a thin dark line in the strata looming above a tumbling, turning river at the bottom of some future abyss? Such were my thoughts as I flew home, looking with wonderment into the Grand Canyon out the window of the plane.
We can grieve our finitude, but there is beauty in it. As the Psalmist said, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”
Who knows what sentient creatures one day will pick through that thin strata of the Anthropocene Era, enraptured?
So let us be in wonderment at our existence, appreciating each other fully, reverencing the universe that brought my best friend to be, and brings the rest of us to be, here and now….