Shape-Shifting: The Metamorphic Rocks

Thin sheets of sediment,

amorphous phyllo,                  

acres in extent, are

buried under flows

of gravel, mud or lava;

each horizontal layer

descends beneath the

weight of new deposits

and in the process

sheds its water and its air.

As pressure forces grains

together, coats them

with a fine cement of

minerals emerging

slick from their dense solutions,

new rock begins to grow

like baklava, placed

down in sheets of phyllo,

honey, butter, nuts

in shallow pans of salten sea,

and even as the rock

is formed, the sea with

its encompassing land

moves gently forward

to converging boundaries,

where continents collide

with oceans, islands

form and disappear, where

sheets of rock slide down

to fiery depths, are shaken,

torn, and softened so the

sheeted layers of rock

can now be pushed and pinched

and pleated into

vast accordions of stone.

There, too, in infinite,

slow, furious, tumult,

the very substance of

the rock is changed, its

molecules and atoms shift,

bonds break, decay, re-form

on microscopic

dancing floors where atoms

waltzing, reeling, twirl

new substance into being.

Limestones turn to marble

then, and shales to slate

and schist; new rocks emerge,

new stones are born as

matter glides to sleeker form.

Immensities of rock

are sunken, twisted,

cooked, like crumpled sheets of

baklava, which baked

in subterranean stoves, will

someday rise and rising

shake the very earth

which they create and then

in geologic

time, dissolve and start anew.

Shape-shifting stone that slides

into fresh form and

essence new, as heat and

depth and time supply B

this is metamorphic rock!

Sr. Sue Elwyn, SSJD

St-Lambert, QC 2005

Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō Eruption 1983 . USGS

Emiliania Huxleyi

Emiliania Huxleyi –

a tiny one-celled alga so small

it takes five thousand lined into a

row to fill a single inch of space  –

contain within each single cell a

mitochondrion, Golgi body, 

nucleus and chloroplast, all that

it needs to feed and reproduce

and at the last to die – essential

elements of life as we know it;

infinitesimal perfection,

pulling nourishment from watery light.

And more – a coccolithophore, it

builds within itself exquisite shields,

fretworks of calcium and carbon

known as coccoliths, astounding shapes

produced inside a tiny globe by

means half-understood, for reasons

quite unknown, these oval wheels with spokes

and rims and two-tiered delicacy,

extruded whole and lovely from the

cell, garnish their maker, sitting rim

to rim or overlapping, twenty or

more around the sphere’s circumference.

Emiliania Huxleyi

are insignificant alone, but

in their billions stain water milky-

white in blooms a hundred miles across.

Thus their life; and when they die, they sink

for weeks through ocean depths to come to

rest at last on the abyssal plain,

sit softly on limey sediment.

Then over countless spans of time, the

slimy mass grows thick with age, sly

cementation fills pores between each

microscopic block, and in the end

it turns to limestone, dolomite or

chalk; a million years may pass as one-

celled algae live and reproduce and

die and in their deaths build depths of stone.

Then sheets of sedimentary rock are

carried on the tides of earth and rise

by gentle increment to make the

underlying crust of continents,

or galvanized by cataclysmic

force build mountain ranges standing tall –

wondrous, one-celled, earth-shaping algae,

Emiliana Huxleyi!

                                               

                                                

Sr. Sue Elwyn, SSJD

Toronto, March, 2006