"Just a Rock"

A lot of people find museums and ruins boring while I find them absolutely amazing. I think this is a matter of perspective. Being a pragmatic person myself I rarely give anything more meaning than it deserves and looking at ruins and only seeing a bunch of stones is absolutely understandable. It's when you open your mind and starts to hear the stones telling their story that they become fascinating. I am not talking about hearing actual voices here, I am talking about appreciating the history which has made these ruins ruins, and what lead up to that particular point when they seized to be walls, ceilings and liveable and became nothing but rocks. This is achieved partly by studying history or, to take it even further, geology, but as these are intricate and difficult sciences wrought with biased opinions and theorizing and exaggerated tales written by victors, using your fantasy and speculating is usually enough to make even the most insignificant looking rocks intriguing. This is not really a new epiphany as I have always found history fascinating but through the series of epiphanies described in earlier posts I can now easier put my fascination into words. 

I did have an epiphany of sorts in Kakadu National Park staring into our campfire (staring into fires always sets the mind racing, and this was no exception), feeling the accumulated history of not only that place but of the entire world weighing down upon me. In Kakadu they have some of the oldest art in the world in the form of aboriginal rock art painted upon rocks that coincidentally also are some of the oldest rocks in the world, formed 1.5 billion years ago, at least according to our exquisite tour guide. Having been a tour guide myself I know the liberties from fact that are sometimes taken, not always on purpose yet especially when it comes to numbers I found in retrospect that people will believe anything you tell them, however implausible. Either way, it did set my mind racing. One painting in particular really put the age of those paintings into perspective. It depicts the Tasmanian tiger, a creature that became extinct as late as the 20th century on its last bastion of Tasmania. But 6000 years ago they existed in the northern part of Australia as well which means the painting of the tiger in Kakadu is AT LEAST 6000 years old. Hold on, SIX THOUSAND. Just grasp that for a second. I am 27 years old, the painting in front of me is 6000 years old. The rock it is painted on is ONE AND A HALF BILLION years old. The rock was created during the meteor showers that brought water to earth and formed in the most chaotic and hostile environment to then erode and be owergrown throughout unthinkable time until sophisticated animals start painting on it and then later on, more sophisticated animals wearing clothes and carrying technological gadgets arrive and take pictures of it. Being in this environment brought back a lot of my earlier thoughts on history at once. History is everything we are, have been and ever will be. To think that if I trace my ancestry far enough back, my forefather trod the earth at the same time aborigine people were painting images of the animals around them and going further back all of us alive today was at some point a one celled organism. This particular epiphany was spawned by Terence Malick's Tree of Life, a film that almost everyone hated, but if I watch it again I will come back to it in another post. This film brilliantly makes the connection that I am trying to make here and which crashed down on me while staring into the fire in Kakadu. That we are all here because of what came before us, the universe and our planet being created, life spawning in the oceans, evolution, the rise of Man, all has led to this exact moment in time where we are now, and we are all part of the same world and same history and carry it with us everywhere we go, whether we realize it or not. Every time you drink a glass of water you are drinking hydrogen atoms created in the Big Bang and just think about the age of stones lying around you and what they have been around for and witnessed. 

Having recently visited Uluru, aka. Ayers Rock, the idea of the history of stone and the fascination that history and geology potentially holds really got put into perspective. So many people have said to me: “it’s just a rock”, the same way ruins are just rocks. This is where you should start to listen to the history of this particular rock. It was once part of a great mountain range, has been continually shifted in numerous directions and now is primarily underground. If you go or have been to Uluru and understand how big it is, these facts will become much more visceral. To then say “it is just a rock”, really makes me feel sorry for people who look at the world like that instead of appreciating history like I do, pragmatic as I believe myself to be.

This thought is a very heavy one, and basically connects to everything I have talked about on this blog so far. As such, it will no doubt pop up again in future posts as it is too big a subject to handle in one post. But give history a chance; it is actually extremely interesting if you open your mind up to it. Not only does it make museums, ruins and big rocks interesting, but since EVERYTHING has a legend, potentially EVERYTHING has an interesting history to tell. Thus EVERYTHING is potentially interesting. When you look at the world with this type of fascination and curiosity I can assure you, you are never bored. Needless to say I don’t carry this notion with me everywhere I go, but it is always refreshing to pop it up once in a while and look at the world with a fascinating gaze even if most of the rocks you encounter are indeed “just rocks”.