Time, Ravens, and Ruins

Raven and Ruins at Chaco Canyon

Here’s another sketch from my trip to Chaco Canyon. Yeah…I’m getting a lot of miles out of that trip. I really need to go back again.

I’ve got a fascination with seeing ruins, for reasons that I don’t understand. While the history and culture of the original builders of the ruins are interesting, that’s not what really fascinates me. It’s not interesting enough to keep me looking at the ruins, anyway.

What I especially love to see is other animals and plants  using the ruins for their own purposes. Growing through the  walls, nesting in the rooms, basking on them…living in them.

Maybe it’s the idea that humans and their works are not permanent on the Earth, and that other life, other intelligences, proceed through time along with us.

The notion that life went on before us, and life will continue after us, in the same way that an eternity of time passed before each of us were born.

The idea that we, like other creatures, are moving through an unimaginably deep ocean of time. So much time that everything is plastic, even continents dancing across the earth in jittery ballet, heaving up mountain ranges in the frantic slow motion collision of tectonic scrimmage lines.

Brian Switek mentioned something in his book My Beloved Brontosaurus that stunned me:

Consider this….Tyrannosaurus lived closer to us in time - 66 million years ago - than it did to Apatasaurus, which lived 84 million years prior.

I’d seen the numbers before, but they didn’t really begin to sink in until reading this. Think of it…we are closer in time to Tyrannosaurus rex, a creature we think of as unimaginably ancient, than T. rex was to a near relative of Brontosaurus. And both of them are relative newcomers, time-wise.

That is a lot of time. Anything could happen. And probably will.

It’s interesting, and comforting.