HAWN FAWN

At the edge of the world, you're suddenly faced with some hard-blowing realizations that can either shake you awake or stir fear into your blood stream and pump it all the way to your heart, stopping it cold.  We are at the capstone of the Holocene, and I am standing, literally, on talus shifted and eroded during the Pleistocene - nearly 2.5 million years difference.  The Sun, a star gone into supernovae, is a mass of Helium and Hydrogen and dust that exploded into existence 4.6 billion years ago, is alive now, is radiating light and heat presently, on my skin, over my head, in my eyes.  And here I am, surrounded by 4600-year-old Methuselah Bristlecone pines.  Here I am, 23-years-young, and only a speck in the eternal timeline, an ephemeral glob of molecules, blood, and organs wrapped in porcelain skin, a non representative piece in the history of existence and evolution.  This can make a person feel small and insubstantial, or, it can make you appreciative of the way the stories of past and present entwine with one another.