Sometimes when I'm feeling overwhelmed about change, I think about the Carnian pluvial episode, when massive volcanic eruptions set off two million years of rain, and at the end of it the earth was both still the earth and also fundamentally different.
I think about how, when the two-million-year rainstorm stopped, so many species had gone extinct, and just as many had taken their place, to the point where the biodiversity was just as much on either side, and yet so very changed.
I think about how that isn't better or worse, it just Is, and how sometimes volcanoes erupt, sometimes it rains for two million years, sometimes the person you became looks nothing like the person you were before, but if you delve into the geologic records of you, you can track all the changes and all the endings and beginnings and becomings, and you are the you before the rainstorm, and during it, and you will eventually change just as much again, and the person you were when the rain stopped will one day sink into the fossil record too.
And I think about how right now I am here, walking on the crust of an ever-changing world, about how I am just as forever-new and forever-old as the soil beneath my feet, about bow change is tangled up in our very bones, and sometimes, it rains for two million years, and the world becomes something new.
