They lie hidden in soft cliffs above this beach, waiting for each cycle of winter storms to loosen the historic record, then layer by layer they are exposed and tumble to the sand below.
These Miocene fossils carry the imprint of animals from an era so long gone it is nearly unknowable. Yet the images are familiar: a snail shell, a spiral nautilus and this scallop shell, once home to a living being who knew these shores ice ages ago.
To hold this relic in my hand connects me to my evolution, to my own watery past—perhaps even on these same shores. Was I once this scallop? Did I crawl onshore seeking something else, something better? Was I this intertidal adventurer, both of the sea and the beach?
There is alchemy here, too: the transformation of an animal into stone, which inspires visions of my own possible immortality. When my bones are returned to the earth will I someday become a poplar? A lilac? Petrified sequoia? Or if I am scattered at sea, might I one day transmute into a living coral reef and become home to another generation of sea life?
This twenty-million-year-old scallop fossil is evidence of a vast permanence beyond my comprehension—and yet, also the transitory nature of animal life—especially my own. Each time I touch it, the stone urges me to live my life with intensity, with aim, with focus—and builds in me a desire to leave some marker of my own presence here, something worth preserving.
The shell even gives its name to the pattern of waves scalloping the shore, the constant, eternal rhythm that soothes me, allows me to see the ebb and flow in my own life, to recognize when I am resisting the onslaught of a tsunami or idling in a neap tide.
A dozen shell ridges fan out across the fossil in a design resonating with so many other images: shafts of sun plunging seaward from water-laden clouds; furrows ploughed into a field awaiting seeds of another harvest; veins of an alder leaf translucent against the August sun. These patterns join me in spirit with the fossil and every manifestation of its archetypal blueprint.
How can I not feel related to this ancient animal, seeing in it my own fingers splayed, reaching upward in joy?
CONTEMPLATIONS
• What in nature speaks to you of immortality?
• What archetypal images stir your soul?
• If you believe in it, and if you have a choice, what would you like to return as?
• What else do you see in the pattern of emanating rays?
Have you ever found a fossil? What did it teach you? I’d love to hear your stories…please share below..
Hold other mineral allies here.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Am hoping to touch a piece of forever tomorrow (7th June). Since the age of 8 I’ve been fascinated with pre-history and finally, on my 38th birthday - the day of the June full moon - I’ll be in the right place, hopefully at the right time, to find a fossil on the South England coastline.
The beaches of Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorset are apparantly great places for fossil hunting as the soft cliff edges give way to the battering winds and rains. Tonight (6th) the rain has been hammering down and maybe, just maybe, a piece of the ancient past will be accessible. Connecting me back to my ancient roots.