One late afternoon in early April I was sitting at a table with my wife while we sipped wine and looked out the windows beside us to the falling sun. I am a life-long lover of the interplay between shadows and light as they share an infinitude of their own limitless variations with each other. The magic of this never ending dance never ceases to fascinate me.
We live on a hilltop southwest of downtown Austin, overlooking a valley and the hills beyond, and another larger, adjacent sprawling valley that is a wildlife preserve called Wild Basin. All of it a vast, ever-evolving palette of shadows and light.
But on this afternoon the thing that caught my eye was only a few feet away from me and it was something that I look at many times every day. But I’d never seen it the way I saw it at that moment. On a wooden cabinet with an old antique slate clock are a collection of some of the shell fossils I’ve collected by the scores over the decades of living on this hilltop. At that moment one particular shell stood out to me, and I saw it as if I were someone else, outside of myself.
For millennia that shell fossil lay in compressed darkness. Numberless millennia passed. Rain. Wind. Storms. Heat. Erosion. Drought. All things in nature worked the fossil toward the surface. And then a man built a stone building, a library, nearby and in the process disturbed the last few feet of earth from above the fossil. Near the surface now, more years passed, rain, wind, storms. Erosion. Then one day that curious man saw the fossil peeking through the dust and picked it up. He washed it off, cleaned and it put it on a wooden chest by an old slate clock that measured time in a way the fossil had never known. And then late one April afternoon a sunbeam silently approached the fossil and rested upon it for a moment before moving on to dusk.
And in that moment the man saw it. Light on an object that had travelled untold millennia in darkness beneath the earth for its moment in the sun.
What are the odds of the slow magic of that?
