Sediment.
Layer upon layer of sediment.
Stunning stratifications of breathtaking colour, crafted over millennia. Unhurriedly eroded through just decades. Inhabited now, in this present moment, by life of such richness and variety as simply cannot be witnessed in one single passing.
Yet its nature, its formation, its very matter... The crushed bones, rotted flesh and pulped tissue of creature and plant; naturally extinct or suffocated in mire; buried under metre after metre, aeon after aeon, megaton after megaton. Fossil-hunters worship at the feet of their grandeur, grateful for the slimmest pickings; children forgotten in their parents' jubilation. Life that was palpable so many, many moons ago, hardened and diminished to this one tiny, barely three-dimensional shard of rock.
We look back with such alacrity. Why, then, can we not cast our gaze forward with a modicum, just a scrap, even a shred of enlightenment?
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