The ground had always been there, a counterbalance to the sky. The ancient ground looked different—rough, jagged, ready for erosion and shaping. It waited for a very long time.

Eventually the ground became soft mounds, connected to other soft mounds, that were connected to larger mounds reaching the mountains. It was a cascade to the sea. Rainwater ran over them and between them, carrying away varying amounts of surface earth until the water met rock, and slowly, even the rock wore away.

But this place remained a series of soft mounds. Plants came and went, and came again. The earth became soil, enriched with generations of plant debris. The debris fed smaller lives, which drew larger ones, each in search of something edible.

The animals, too, became food, and the cascade continued.

Eventually humans came near the place, but not until a very long time had passed. So much time that the soil had become deep and rich, while the water lay far below in the water table.

Humans followed the traces of other animals and the traces of edible seeds. There was enough to gather, but not enough to settle for long. Other places offered a steady supply of shellfish.

So steady, in fact, that after harvesting, the shells were thrown to the ground and stepped upon, over and over, until they formed mounds of their own—places upon which humans would eventually live.

This place, this mound, was not made with human hands. It was made from debris of far greater magnitude.

Everything waited for the next great change, and that change was humans choosing this place to live. They came with tools to level part of the mound. They came with tools to seek the water deep beneath the soil. They came to plant their own seeds and place their own animals in pens and corrals.

They thought themselves masters of this place.

Yet the place had already hosted forests, grasses, countless lives, and kingdoms of creatures that had come and gone without ever knowing they belonged to something larger than themselves.

They built a structure to shelter themselves from the weather. The shelter almost seemed to morph on its own, growing taller, growing wider, giving shelter to a growing family.

In the lifetime of humans, it seemed forever. In the lifetime of the soil, it was only a moment. In the lifetime of the ground, it barely registered beyond the present.

In the ‘now’ the structure still exists. It is a shadow of its former self. Paint blasted by the weather, bare wood desiccated by the heat of the sun, a dry, mottled place, abandoned by humans.

In their time, it seems old. They never look at the ground, or the plants surrounding. There may be a dim reckoning that the tree may have been a sapling, but only because they are slightly aware of how a tree grows.

In the ‘now’ it has become an image, a frame of the surrounding landscape. Bringing meaning to a place that has already been a place for eons.

For humans it is a discovery, that tells us something significant.