The Myth of Permanence

My philosophical side attempts to welcome change, knowing that nothing is permanent, especially within of a mere human or even the lifespan of human civilization. I was wandering at Big Bend National Park when I took this photo. Right on the trail is the fossil of spiral shell that once housed an ammonite. An ammonite is a mollusk, closely related to a squid or octopus. The entire line of ammonites (though many families and species) existed from the Devonian period up until the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in the Upper Cretaceous. This group of mollusks existed for over 300 million years. It’s incredible to think of an order of organism surviving that long. That’s many order of magnitudes longer than Homo sapiens have existed, let alone human civilization. Come to think of it, we are the last of our line. There are no more hominids like us in the world. Yet, we seem to have this notion that we understand eternity, that we can contemplate forever. I do not believe we can, nor do I think we were ever supposed to. Everything in this universe changes, everything is transient. Even the fundamental elements that make up the universe are created in massive supernovas and altered within our nuclear reactors.

Just take a moment and let it sink in that this fossil was of a creature that lived in the open ocean. I stumbled upon it while hiking a desert trail on the border between Mexico and Texas along the Rio Grande Valley. At some point in the last hundreds of millions of years this creature died, was fossilized on the seafloor, and then the seafloor uplifted for the fossil to be left near a river bed in a desert.

Play your verse and play it true, but you are only a snapshot in the grand interplay of the universe. Perhaps, if you are as lucky as this mollusk, you can leave behind a good-looking fossil.

Transient

And to cheat a little this also works for this weeks challenge. 🙂

Delta

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