Clams and Time

The days are crisp and clear.  The nights are full of stars and bone cold.  The ground is frozen until after two o'clock.  Some days it never thaws and remains a firm reminder under our feet.  A contrast to the muddiness of a month ago.

Something comes in the night to carry our garbage, cans and all down a ravine near the house that flows into the huge, ancient, dry stream below our house.  It flows for seventy-five miles, North to South, parallel to Pecos Canyon.  Ancient fossils of strange yet familiar clams dot the rocks along its unknown shore.

This is the bed of the original sea, now eighty-five hundred feet above the oceans we know.  Some of these rock clams look like two angels wings beautifully joined.  Others resemble the clams I learned to dig and to relish in my days in New England.  The mud stone they inhabit is green and brown.  I wonder if that was the color of the vastness of the mudflat they lived in when the world was mostly ocean?  I wonder if it smelled like low tide on the clam flats along the Bay of Fundy in the middle of summer? 

I wonder if the land tide the moon created every day when it once was so close helped raise these enchanted mountains of sangre?  I wonder if the volcanoes round about, once belching, who threw the globs of heavy, iron rich lava bombs I find everywhere in Nuevo Mexico del Norte let anything live anywhere near them.  Did everything die here and there in the Volcano Zones?  Was it so volcanized worldwide that life on the surface almost died out only to rise from the seas, the fungus among us, and the air while the moon plowed and plowed the mountains up out of oceans time and time again? 

We keep coming back.  We the life forms that persist and persist everywhere in the universe.  Indeed, life is the most common thing in the wide universe.  It is the very essence of existence.  Life is the most abundant element everywhere.  The spark of life, the energy that allows even the most fundamental chemical and elemental interaction to happen at all in order to become that which is life, is fueled by a desire to be living.  That background sigh, that breath of all the cosmos is one with all we and the universe are.  The original elemental concept sprung into being by the original elemental response is love, light; consciousness in adinfinetum.  It has a beginning; the original moment and therefore, the beginning of consciousness, and it has an end; the moment energy completely expends itself and exinstance ceases to exist. 

Michael