Geology lessons

Hey, it's Sunday morning.

Recently, I was visiting my son in Maine—his favorite place in the world, where he went to school and first fell in love with geology.

Naturally, we ended up talking about rocks.

Granite, specifically. One of the hardest common rocks on Earth. And yet, even granite is no match for an ice sheet. Slow and steady, it scrapes, pulls, and presses until the landscape is forever changed.

The evidence is everywhere.

Long marks in the stone. Valleys carved from once-solid mountains. Entire regions reshaped by a force moving in slow motion.

I couldn't help but think of fear. How it moves through life the same way, quietly and steadily, leaving its mark on our minds, our bodies, our nervous systems. Toes gripping, shallow breath, grooves carved by years of bracing for impact that never comes.

Like the land, we often don't notice until much later.

Because here's the thing about ice sheets: they retreat.

Slowly, stubbornly, but they retreat.

And what remains isn't the same landscape. It's a place that knows what it survived, a place that remembers pressure and also release.

I spent decades building under the weight of that ice.

Now that it's gone, I'm standing on ground I don't recognize.