Inspired by our travels to Arches National Park.
The only downfall of Moab, Utah? In summer, it tops 100 degrees by 11 am.
But during our visit, we got a fairly early start and hit Arches National Park before ten. I’d never been here before, and I can say with solemn reverence that it was nothing short of stunning. I’m not usually the type to ohh and aww over geological wonders (I’d much rather learn about the people of a place, for instance, than how old its rocks are), but Arches certainly accommodated me in keeping with my recent travel theme of perspective and scope.
Walking through its canyons (or scrambling up them, as the case may have been as I chased after errant children), I was once again made painfully aware of my insignificance. Just as I had felt inside the vast caverns of Great Basin a week prior, staring at stalagmites millions of years in the making (quick, are those the ones hanging down or the ones pointing up?) Moab’s arches reminded me that the universe does not care that I, a random human being, chose the 23rd of July, 2009 to tread upon these particular coordinates of earth. Or any other, for that matter. The arches were there countless years before me, and will likely be there countless after me.
I think, if only for my own benefit, that I need to repeat that: does not care. That’s hard for us to grasp, isn’t it? I think this may be why time as a concept feels so elusive to us, and distance, for that matter: earlier in this road trip, I could barely wrap my mind around The Loneliest Highway in America, let alone the distance between a single star above my tent’s canvas and the path of its light to our planet. Our entire perspective is limited to such a tiny pin drop of experience.
We’re so self involved, the human race.
So in keeping with that theme as well, I can only offer these words. Of mine. And these photos. Of my family. On this date. In this place. Where, for the briefest of moments (brief to the universe, anyway…long as only a car trip with a four-year-old can be to me), my microscopic blink of an existence made contact with the impossibly long span of earth’s history, touching ground upon the smooth desert sandstone of dusty Moab.
