I Used To Sit In

The Summit Of Mount Everest Is Marine Limestone.

A Quarter-horse Jockey Learns To Think Of A Twenty-second Race As If It Were Occurring Across Twenty Minutes--in Distinct Parts, Spaced In His Consciousness. Each Nuance Of The Ride Comes To Him As He Builds His Race. If You Can Do The Opposite With Deep Time, Living In It And Thinking In It Until The Large Numbers Settle Into Place, You Can Sense How Swiftly The Initial Earth Packed Itself Together, How Swiftly Continents Have Assembled And Come Apart, How Far And Rapidly Continents Travel, How Quickly Mountains Rise And How Quickly They Disintegrate And Disappear.

On A Certain Scale, It Does Look Like I Do A Lot. But That’s My Day, All Day Long, Sitting There Wondering When I’m Going To Be Able To Get Started. And The Routine Of Doing This Six Days A Week Puts A Little Drop In A Bucket Each Day, And That’s The Key. Because If You Put A Drop In A Bucket Every Day, After Three Hundred And Sixty-five Days, The Bucket’s Going To Have Some Water In It.

Rocks Are Records Of Events That Took Place At The Time They Formed. They Are Books. They Have A Different Vocabulary, A Different Alphabet, But You Learn How To Read Them.

The Enthusiasm Geologists Show For Adding New Words To Their Conversation Is, If Anything, Exceeded By Their Affection For The Old. They Are Not About To Drop 'granite.' They Say 'granodiorite' When They Are In Church And 'granite' The Rest Of The Week.