Stone Witness

The shale split with a cool rasp, exposing dark striations layered across its face like the rings of a tree – millennia compressed into fragile earth. Within those bands lay whispers of past environments, each sediment offering a useful analogy for vanished worlds. Examining a single grain revealed flecks of obsidian alongside shells, evidence of fire and water intimately interwoven; forces normally understood as separate blended in the stone's quiet density. Such confluence suggested that what appears fixed is merely a temporary equilibrium, a garden constantly remade by time’s slow drift into new arrangements.