I like to wander over the rocky pavements, linger on an outcrop, examine each crystal on the rough surface, run my fingers over them, feel their texture, note their individual shapes. When I press my palms against their cool surface, I imagine that I am feeling some sense of their history, their unimaginable past, in the fleeting warmth of my skin.
It was early morning, years ago. I woke up warm and groggy. A deep ‘da-dunk, da-dunk’ sound announced each heavy judder of the soft seat in which I was slumped. I wondered where I was, watching bewildered as a strange world rushed past the window, long saturated rays of the rising sun draped across the unfamiliar landscape. Before my mind could catch that dangling thread of consciousness that would draw me back to a reality that sleep had cast aside, a magical glittering dance caught my eye. On the wall of the train carriage beside me, and on the ceiling, a million points of coloured light were dancing in unison, spreading outward in brilliant circles, skittering past each other in patterns that I couldn’t quite grasp but that hinted at a hidden order. Where did they come from? How were they possible? And suddenly I realised that they moved as I moved. And I was gripped by the exhiliration that this magical spectacle was under my control. It was the diamond in my ring. The morning sunlight caught the crystal faces and scattered the light in brilliant reflections of its internal structure. The smallest movement of my hand sent glittering arrays dancing around me, hundreds of single beams of light. Tiny messages sent out into a sleeping world, their patterned dance revealing the crystal’s shape, each facet, each angle.
For me, the sharp-edged minerals on the cold surface of the rock I now sit on are as magical as the diamond on the train. Both are ethereal. The diamond’s brilliant whiteness, it’s stunning hardness, its mere physical existence is magical when you consider where it was born. The diamond crystallised hundreds, even thousands, of kilometres below my feet under the enormous pressure of the Earth around it. Now here, at the Earth’s surface, it is unstable. It shouldn’t exist. Just like the minerals in the rock I am sitting on. The diamond should be graphite here at the Earth’s surface. But a spark, a push is needed to make that reaction happen. So instead, here it is on my finger, like an impossible dream, defying the new reality it inhabits. But throw it in a fire and it will disintegrate into black dust.
These are my thoughts as I sit on this cold rock, one like a million others in Greenland. The rock is three billion years old. A thousand times older than the diminutive Lucy, our distant ancestor who stood on two legs and looked out across a green valley in Ethiopia three million years ago. And the minerals that I feel under my fingertips are as unstable as the diamond on my finger, balanced on the edge of a reality far from the one in which they were born, deep inside the Earth. But like my diamond, here they are. Solid, resilient, as pristine as they were three billion years ago when the Earth was silent, almost lifeless, drowned beneath empty seas, waiting under dark and toxic skies. I soak up the feeling of the rock’s cold surface, the sharp edges of those ancient crystals, each a tiny miracle from a distant past.
