Quote of the Day - 03/22/2012

Lost cities, erased from living memory – for centuries even their names were forgotten.  After the splendors of their golden age, in the 9th century the Maya cities suffered the ravages of famine, war, and depopulation and then were finally abandoned.  The forest returned.  Roots wrapped themselves around the stelae, bringing them crashing to the ground.  Thrusting branches weakened the temple walls and forced their way through the roofs. - Claude Baudez and Sydney Picasso in Lost Cities of the Maya (Discoveries)

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We tend to think of the buildings and houses we inhabit having a kind of permanence that they really don’t have. If we walked away - even buildings of stone would not last long. Would what we leave behind be enlightening to someone finding the ruins 1,000 years from now? Probably - but would their understanding resemble the way we think about ourselves at all?

Consider the people that left the Mayan ruins behind. Maybe many died in an epidemic or civil war…or maybe they simply rejected what the buildings represented and reverted to the way they lived before the stone edifices were built. We are curious about everything that has gone before us and the pieces of a puzzle that we may be able to solve holds our attention. It is the seeker in us that is keen to discover the secrets of the ruins in the forest.

I find the image of the forest ‘bringing them crashing to the ground’ fascinating by itself. It’s a good reminder - what a difference there is in biologic time (plant life times/our lifetimes) and geologic time. Our creations have a lifetime closer in length to our own.