I fell in love with geology when I eighteen, a freshman in college, and experiencing heartbreak for the first time. It was the flashy stuff that drew me in: earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, you know, anything that causes mass destruction. But that infatuation phase was not true love. I didn’t find that until I found sand. Sand doesn’t have the glitz of a natural disaster, but it has so much depth. What always strikes me is it’s endless layers. Look at a mountain of sandstone and see one thing. Look at a cliff and you’ll discover new secrets. Closer still, and you’ll see the layers made by a storm, a stream, a blowing wind. Reach out and touch these layers and you can almost be there when that rock was being born. Smaller still and you can hold it in your hand. What was once a uniform brown morphs into a rainbow. Take out a magnifying glass, then a microscope. At each level you learn something new about the earth long ago. Sand is the poetry the surface of the earth has left for us to read.
This page contains some of my geology chronicles. Geology taught me that adventure is possible. It taught me that I am enough. It taught me that I am small and that is beautiful because I am a grain of sand.
“To see a world in a grain of sand…”
William Blake
Breakfast and a Newborn Basalt
