Dinosaur Bones

I remember staring at dinosaur bones in Chicago's Field Museum a few years back. Once great animal flesh, now fossilized bones of rock. Before they were dug up, they lay under the ground, unknown to those who trod upon them-- man, beasts, nature, seasons, wind, rain, ancient seas, glaciers, eons. They would still lie beneath the layers of time if curious humans (humans like me and yet so unlike me) had not the ability to question and seek reasons regarding their place on the earth.

Their place in the universe.

Why do you suppose we look for the ancient before? Hold on to heirlooms, memories? I believe we may do it seeking the eternal that lies ahead. How else can you explain the vast amount of time that lies ahead of us if we cannot recognize the same millennial passage that has already occurred? How do we ever hope to understand a hundred years let alone a billion years? A hundred-billion years?

I will only live a minuscule fraction or time relative to forever, a grain of sand in an eternal hourglass—one holding billions and billions of grains.

My grain will become like dinosaur bones and I wonder, will anyone even care to dig them up and gaze with fear and wonder at them. I kind of hope so. Like I look at dinosaurs and woolly mammoth. Re-assembled, fossilized, human-dinosaur bones. With amazed wonder.