Petrified Forest.

Fascinating to me as a kid; I was attracted to the colors and the idea of wood becoming stone. But to read about it wasn’t satisfying, to be told about it was just confusing. I wanted to understand how a forest (which from my east coast perspective was a stand of mostly green trees in a dense area filled with damp smells and sounds of critters running around) could really be stone and not wood. And why they were so scared, so petrified. If I had ever been asked to draw what I was imagining it would have been much more like the Wizard of Oz to me.

Watching a video of it now is so interesting in the way it both conjures those childhood memories and also lays waste to them. Rolling hills of colored sad, chunks of wood/stone lying this way and that. Not the magic forest I imagined at all; yet something else altogether fascinating in a different way. I turned the music off to imagine what it must sound like out there or to at least get closer to it (the music was unhelpful/distracting); would love to get closer to how hot it must be, to the reflections in the sand along the way, the crunch under my foot, to the sound of the wind and the openness. Are there any green plants at all? Any birds or animals skittering about? I could imagine being a little nervous there.