ROAD BLOG AHEAD

Something landed on my desk today and I just had to share it with you.

While in town today, Lena treated a pilgrim down from Spiti, an isolated region high up in the mountains on the border of India and Tibet with a culture nearly as old as these mountains. She gave him money for food and he gave her something from his pockets - a pair of “interesting” rocks picked up near his home:

Ammonite fossils. Beautiful ones - the specimen on the left is more than 6 centimeters in diameter which is pretty large as these go (though I’ve seen some huge ones in collections.) Despite their appearance, Ammonites were closely related to squid and cuttlefish. They made their appearance on Earth about 500 Million (that’s half a BILLION!) years ago and went extinct sixty-five million years ago - give or take a millenia or two - about the same time and from the same probably cause - as the last dinosaurs. They were (obviously?) sea creatures and these probably lived - and died - in the deep ocean that once lay between what is today the Indian subcontinent and the vastness of Asia.
The totally astonishing thing is that this was found in Spiti, a landlocked region, at an altitude somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 feet above sea level. A place that is so obscure, so harsh that it’s hard to believe anyone actually lives there. It’s one of the least populous areas within the technical borders of India:

I did a little research and learned how these fossils came to rest among the rocks and geological rubble that comprise so much of the Himalayas, a journey that took them from the depths of extinct oceans to the heights of great mountains. It’s likely that the same process gave us the huge blocks of Himalayan salt common around here. It’s so cheap, I use kilo chunks as bookends:

What I learned is that the land mass that is India spent about one hundred million years crawling northwards after it broke apart from what is today Antarctica, Africa and a bunch of smaller bits. It was only about 40 million years ago that it slammed into Asia and the continental shelves were thrust upwards by the force of the collision, creating the Himalayas. They are, as mountain ranges on this planet go, fairly young. All those rocks, including the ones containing ammonites and other fossils and minerals that don’t generally appear at 14,000 feet, got carried upwards in the process.

So a pilgrim from Spiti who has never seen the sea, came to our relatively temperate little village in the lower reaches of those same young mountains, to see and circumnambulate the sacred lake. In his pocket he carried strange stones from his home whose fossilized occupants may be as much as half a billion years old, to trade for some medicine and maybe a sack of rice and lentils to see him through the winter.

There are so many miracles all around us if only we stop for a moment and take the time to look, as he did, at the world around him. It’s possible that every one of us has some sort of miracle in our pockets. Isn’t it all really in the context?