The Colorado Plateau is a geologist’s dream. How can rock be alive? Yet it once was. Take a look at this picture…
I am a know-it-all, so it is with some humility that I confess I cannot make out what made these scratches on the stone. If anyone can explain it, please do. It was taken along a trail down from Goodman Point into a place called Sand Canyon, in southwest of Colorado. My guess is that these are fossils of some kind: tracks of worms, imprints of vegetation, maybe a maze devised by tiny but intelligent dinosaurs.
It makes me think of time, and insignificance. Of all the trees that stand on the planet, how many have ever been named, much less celebrated? No one’s named this juniper, living at the edge of a cliff in Cedar Breaks, Utah.
Forgotten lakes, engineered to last forever. I walked across the north end of Lake Powell this fall. This is what’s left…
Forgotten men, mining treasure. These are the insides of a remote uranium mine excavated during the Cold War. The men who lived and worked here are long gone…
A forgotten God. This is the altar of St. Boniface, a church where my grandfather was janitor, and my mother went to school during the Great Depression…
Cities built without measure. Of course, you know that this is Vegas. I wonder what alien archaeologists will make of it when they visit here in a few thousand years, perhaps finding us gone…
All we leave behind are traces, fossils, dubious graffiti. Time disposes of us. To look for eternity in time, in monuments and memories, is to search and never find. It’s to wander in exile in a past that ever recedes. To live in memory is to reach for an inaccessible hope.
The light is now.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Two of his short stories have recently been published online. The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October