50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 18 - El Morro National Monument
The next morning my friend and I went our separate ways, he to return home, me to . . . where? On the map I noticed a place called El Morro National Monument in western New Mexico. That sounded intriguing.
Once there, I learned that El Morro is famous for its cliff “graffiti” by historical travelers, who quenched their thirst at a deep water hole at the base of the actual El Morro formation, a rocky ridge that juts up from the expansive lowland flats of juniper and sagebrush. The earliest inscriptions are those of Spanish officials, more than four hundred years ago. After a glimpsing this remarkable history along El Morro’s base, I hiked a trail to the top.
On the way up I passed through various bands of colored rock: off-white Zuni sandstone, then a thick layer of reddish rock, then a thinner darker zone. Finally, at the top came especially hard red-gray sandstone, which served as the ridge’s erosion-resistant capstone. The time scales were awesome. The thin, darker zone just under the capstone had been laid down from desert outwash sediments, about 170 million years ago. Then came a hiatus, a discontinuity. Perhaps the shallow sea had receded. After an interval of 70 million years the water returned and so did the deposition of sediments that were to become today’s red-gray capstone. All this occurred during the heyday of the dinosaurs.
I learned about these geologic events from the guidebook I carried and the rangers at the visitor station, all of which allowed me to imagine 170 million years in the past, in which the region had sand dunes like the Sahara desert, crisscrossed by intermittent streams. How this knowledge enhanced the experience! Without such knowledge, my vision would have lacked insight. I would never have known these things by just looking and attempting to know without thought. So it is because of thinking—discovering deep time through science—that we can appreciate what we are seeing. To really see things as they are, we need every bit of thinking we can get.
These ideas are relevant to the issue of personal psychology. Knowledge about evolution can change the way I see myself. More to the present moment, such knowledge helps me see myself as I am. The enhancement, ultimately, comes about because the way that knowledge can affect this moment to moment experience. My hike at El Morro—my experience—was enhanced by knowledge from geology. Similarly, my hike through life—during introspection—can be enhanced by knowledge from the findings of psychology and biology. Our drive for sex, for example, has roots in the evolution of brains and behaviors of mammals who were thriving as small insect-eaters during the times when the rocks I saw today in the lofty plateau of New Mexico were laid down as ancient coastal sediments.
Note: See also “Day 7 Grooving with Gravity,” for a related theme of knowledge enhancing experience.
© 2024 by Jeffrey W Bloom
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