I. 391 million years ago, a mollusk opens its shell to greet the warm, rising young sun. It begins the new day by nourishing itself with algae on the salty ocean floor. It feeds and consumes; always in pursuit of new and more plentiful horizons.

II. Eventually, moments of glacial melting, sea level rises, drought, swampy expanses, and eventual land masses define the area that the mollusk once thrived. Their shells dried up, along with the coral plains, the trilobites, and the rest of the once dominant sea life, becoming forever preserved in their new home of stone and sediment.

III. Hundreds of millions of years later, while foraging for fossils along the Ohio River Valley, the mollusk lies in its fossilized state somewhere just below the mud on a creekbed in the distance. The iridescence on the surface of its shell still gleams slightly in the light of the sun. The pursuit of the unknown draws them to the banks of the water where they reach down to grab the rock and brush off the ancient dirt. Admiring the relief for its transcendental beauty, a diminished sense of self washes over them; time itself becomes obscured.

IV. All of the unknowable forces that led them to this place at this time converged at once; they shaped this moment beyond any imaginable comprehension. All that ever was, everything that is, and all that ever will be can be felt in this lingering instant of deep time. Outside of perception and outside of ourselves, it remains.

i. A new world of connections in networks far more complex begins to breed; constantly replicating itself for future survival. Its mission is to make us obsolete, to overcome our agency for a deeper sense of becoming. Our entanglements of self hold us back in this strange landscape, we are unable to adapt.

ii.The sun begins to set and dusk settles in. Our experiences have become clouded by the systems we once endured; we have yet to harness our energy in this precarious moment of change. It lowers still despite our unpreparedness. Everything comes down to this; to one fold in space, one moment in time, one last breath. . .

iii. In the dark of night, let the tide wash over you on the banks of the calcarine fissure.

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