Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

reading that National Park leaflet, and it suddenly occurred to me-- maybe I should take the desert more seriously, study flora and fauna, sort rock types, learn the epochs and dryly recite their millions of years, and only after all that work is done should I dare try to poeticize the place . . . Maybe. But my god have you read that science? The Arches leaflet was over the top-- it was a sinkhole basin 300 million years ago, alternately dry or sea-covered, leaving a thousand foot deep salt bed. By sixty million years later the ancestral Rockies had eroded (ponder that!) to fill the basin with dunes. Forty million years later it became a mud flat that came and went and laid down bright red Moenkopi sandstone, just one of many layers laid down, a deformed salt bed below, shifted strata to different heights from one side of the canyon to the other . . . All this and I still had a hundred-something million years to go. I stopped reading.

mnaz wrote:All this and I still had a hundred-something million years to go. I stopped reading.

It sometimes takes weeks, even months to digest large amounts of information and figuring out whether that much knowledge will improve the life of a bristlecone pine tree or even the composting time for a monofilament fishing line (600 years).

maybe the visual is enough....maybe we don't need to how or why.....just IS...

Geology, hmmpphh. The rock tappers speak some strange poetry.

The bristlecones are a trip, Cec-- so strange to think of those bizarre twisty trees being alive back in Old Testament times.

saw-- sounds like Ed Abbey's philosophy. Don't fixate on the process, it's each tree, or grain of sand, or blade of grass that matters.

Desert solitaire.

this thread is why I love studio eight

thank you