The Experience
Had a metaphysical experience in Big Bend last week. On our first day in the park, we were driving around looking at the sights. There were four of us in the truck. I saw a display sign, the sort they have all throughout the park, and asked to stop. The driver obliged. I got out. Everyone else stayed put. My curiosity making me the curiosity. Anyway, the sign was about volcanoes and Goat Mountain, pointing out the lava flows and Tuff and erosion that make Goat mountain Goat mountain.
While I was standing there reading, a couple approached, and we began talking. They were from Canada, Toronto to be exact. That was good. I’ve been to Toronto. A lot. The publishing company I once worked for did business with a Canadian Publisher headquartered in Toronto. We were exclaiming over the beauty of the surroundings, and the husband began talking the hand of God. Somehow, I’m not really sure how, I offered up that geology used to be tied to the bible and the flood, and that now we knew better because the earth was billions of years old.
He offered up this observation: when you’re dealing with an infinite being we have no way of knowing anything about its concept of time. I thought that was pretty profound. Suddenly, I understood how it was possible to see the hand of God at work in a landscape that was billions of years old in a universe that was even older, because what’s age to an infinite being. You might say my paradigm shifted as I pondered the imponderable while staring into infinity while looking at pieces of rock.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale