When I was young my father always felt that children should play outside.  He reasoned that as a child he had spent everyday till sundown out of doors playing games.  Our generation, he admonished, was spoiled on television and video games. If he were to come home from work and find us in the house he would chase us out into the day.  Because I preferred the company of my books to people it became necessary for me to find a quiet place to call my own.  My refuge, a secluded boulder beside the Indian creek, was surrounded by trees and foliage.  It could only be reached by way of an ill-fashioned path through the forest behind my childhood home.  I spent most of my free time there, reading and thinking.  

One day as I sat reading I noticed something I had not seen before.  There, carved into the impenetrable surface of my boulder was a small fossil.  It was not a familiar form and so was unrecognizable to me as an animal or fish. But we were learning about fossils in school at the time so I knew right away that it had been a living thing. I could not believe that I had never seen it before.  So many days I sat in the same spot on my rock soaking up the sun and listening to the water trickle past on its way downstream.  Yet I’d never noticed the small fossil that sat right next to me. 

As I examined the tiny imprint it occurred to me that this creature had once lived here.  Lived as I do now; my mind was slowly grasping what that meant.  It meant that like the little being that marked my rock-my life too would one day end.  I looked around at the trees and the hill in the distance; I wondered how this landscape might have looked when this creature scurried about? All manner of thoughts came rushing toward me and at once I understood the insignificance and brevity of life.  As though someone had turned a switch in my mind and enlightened me. I realized that the world would go on after my passing just as it did after the passing of my fossil friend.  Much in the same way it went on now.  The scenery may change and the landscape shift but the trees would reach toward the sun and the water would flow downstream. The wind would blow and the leaves rustle just as they did now. At first it was depressing; to think that none of it mattered, that I wouldn’t matter. 

But then I remembered my fossil friend.  This one insignificant little creature forever changed the space that it had inhabited.  It left behind a mark, a gift for me to find.  In a sense it had spoken to me. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with emotion. I felt connected to everything; the grass on the hillside, the ant walking across my hand, the fish in the creek and even the people who had been here before me, we were all one, a part of each other. And though I sat there by myself and crying, I’ve never felt less alone nor more full of hope.