Tracing the outlines

I’m tracing the outlines of a barnacle city on the rocks of Westray’s shore.

The outlines remind me of looking down on New York City at night from the Empire State Building. These barnacles are living in the traces of mud-cracks in a lake shore from 380 million years ago. They’re seeking shelter from the waves in places where the rock is ever so slightly softer and has weathered faster than the surroundings. The mud which came with the rains after the drought and filled the cracks left behind in Lake Orcadie was a very slightly different composition. After a bogglingly-long geological time, much of it spent deep under the Earth, here it is, showing us marks from the weather on another world which used to be where we are now.

What will be here in 380 million years when we are all gone, and will it think of us?