Years and years ago, I found this small gray stone on the beach at Lake Michigan, only 1 centimeter in diameter. It seemed like a fossil of some kind, but I never identified it. It just felt incredibly unique and I saved it all these years, storing it in a small crochet bag that just fit. Along with the star shaped indentation, there were zigzag lines marking six layers. Easier to see in these side and back views.

The stone came to mind today, as I was thinking about the great extinction events in earth’s geologic history. It started by watching a PBS show Eons, about the Permian extinction of 250 million years ago, called the Great Dying. They said that about 70 percent of land species and 90 percent of ocean species were wiped out. I had already been familiar with the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, when at least 75% of all species died. There have been at least five great extinction events in geologic time on Earth, and many more, depending on how one counts. We only know about such events because of fossils in the rock layers, and the changes and absences of fossils in different layers of rock. Some say we may be heading to a new extinction event caused by human contribution to climate change.

And then I compare my own seventy plus years of life on planet earth. It doesn’t even register as a speck in that vast unfolding that has shaped the life of this planet. All of our human endeavors in recorded history don’t even measure up to a speck.

For some reason, this comforts me today, as I grieve the cruelty and devastation that some members of our species are inflicting on the life of our time. Because no matter what horrors some humans are wreaking on the planet, the earth is truly so much more powerful than we can imagine. Earth time is so much longer than human time. I truly love our ecosystem, the forms that life takes in our time, that life of which we are lucky enough to be a part. The plants and animals, trees, flowers, vegetables and fruits in the garden, the fish and corals in the sea. We humans are just a small part of this vast flowering of life and I hope this flowering survives. It is so beautiful and mysterious and unique.

But even if we destroy it all, the earth itself will not be destroyed. Each time, the earth recreates life from the ashes of prior deaths, in the eons of earth time that are beyond our conception. We’ve been lucky enough in our time to discover many of the secrets hidden in the stones. Why isn’t it enough to make us humble? To fill us with gratitude for the life we are so privileged to share?

Have mercy on us, oh mother Earth! Let our earth community thrive!