Stories may be told with pen and paper, words and gestures, or pictures or sculptures. But there are other stories to be told. Snapshots of plots hinted at by the movements of the tiniest particles, the pitted surface of the smallest grain of sand.
Perhaps, streams and rivers are the arteries and blood vessels, trees and leaves the sensors, birds, ants and animals the messengers, their ecosystems the cells, the melted interior the ever-burning heart. Raindrops are tears of a thousand tragedies, and the winds an eternal tale of a million tragedies, speaking with the breath of a billion voices.
With a careful eye and infinite patience, a minute layer of sand and dust may translate as the rise and fall of a past culture. A tale of love and children, betrayal and death.
But go deeper. Deeper still, at a different scale and another level of time, there lies another story to be told. That of rising mountains, rivers of fire and Kings before the reign of man. A world of water full of life where now there is only dust and desert.
On a rock, in the northwest corner of Wyoming, a horny toad basks in the warmth of the sun.
Beneath its feet, below the few inches of dry and barren soil, lies a rich golden yellow powder, fine and light. As an earlier, more savage Earth had turned and twisted, battered from the heavens, it had spat out its fury in molten anger, which froze into minute spheres of glass and fine flakes of clay, and filled the sky and rained upon the earth in a layer four hundred feet thick.
Beneath this band of gold are thinner layers of black rock, layered one upon another. And beneath this is another vast wall of ash.
And so forth, deep into the earth.
Keeping time within these tiny flakes, are other, smaller worlds. Worlds which surrender themselves to their children, new daughters every thousand voyages of our world around the sun. They tell of these events, in their tiny atomic voice of decay.
This world, they say, changes every seventy thousand years. And the last change happened seventy thousand years ago.
Yellowstone is a story like any other. It has no beginning, middle or end, but is constantly being retold, and like any story, constantly changes in its telling.
Were the horny toad to relate its version of the tale, it would be short, concerned with yummy flies, warm suns, blue skies and followed by a sudden flash of light and pain.
It couldn't tell of the 757 caught in the sudden updraft, the thousands of people caught in the explosions; the tourists who watched as the air around them welded together into a burning wall of rock, or the cloud of death that would settle over farms and cities for a thousand miles in all directions.
He would know nothing of the ruined harvests, the hundreds of millions of starving families. Or of the golden and purple sunsets that now shone over the horizons of the South Pacific.
Of the worst eruption in Gaia's memory.
It could only tell of flies and ash, footprints and bone, left behind for future worlds.
And for Earth, on a larger scale, it was business as usual. A heartbeat in a near infinite lifetime.
Stories within stories.
Words within worlds