Leaf 4 – A Newfound Admiration for Buried Treasure

I’ve missed posting the past two weeks, but I’ve got a great excuse!

I was shopping.

Yeah, right, me? Shopping? And then trying to use it as an excuse for missing two blog posts? But it’s true! See, this wasn’t just a few too many trips to the mall. This was serious business. The company I work for buys a significant amount of gift shop inventory from the Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase, so, being the general manager, I got to go! It meant a lot of preparation beforehand, figuring out how much of which items we needed to get and doing preorders when possible, and then when we got there it meant days of walking up & down rows of tents looking at seemingly endless tables of products & keeping track of everything as we compared prices & discussed trying new items. It was tiring work, but, ok, yes, it was fun, too! I didn’t take any photos that really do any justice to the incredible variety of gems, jewelry, beads, minerals, fossils and other stuff, nor the sheer size of the showcase, but I did try to take a few worth sharing...

I was reading a book about geodes & nodules on my way to Tucson, so then seeing these impressively huge amethyst nodules was even more cool for me because I had just been learning about how they’re formed, where they’re found, the process of extraction, etc. and now I was up close with the real deal.

Looking at all the different minerals and ways things can form, the only articulation I could manage beyond “wow” was “God is so creative.”

This is a feeble attempt at showing how abundant the fossils were. This is a small, small fraction of it, and they’re almost all from Morocco. There were entire tables and water fountains and place settings carved out of rock littered with fossils. There were fossils overlapping other fossils. There were different kinds of fossils in the same piece of rock. They made me want to go to Morocco.

Just one of the many vendors there, this one caught my attention because it reminded me of a dear friend from New Zealand.

At first, I didn’t think this trip was really a “turning a new leaf” kind of blog topic, but upon thinking about it more, I think it works. I climb rocks, I enjoy beading jewelry, I work in a cave, I’ve gone through the standard issue earth science classes, I’ve been to the Grand Canyon countless times; I am exposed to and interact with geology on a somewhat regular basis. But going to the gem show reignited a level of awe & wonder of God’s creation that I had somewhere in the mix started taking for granted.

So, my challenge to you, my friends, is this: Go outside. Find a rock (or several rocks!). Examine it, and if you feel so inclined, try to identify it (rockhounds.com has an easy-to-follow flowchart). Think about how many different minerals compose that rock. If you did identify the rock type & can look up the different minerals, do a Google image search to see photos of the minerals in their raw/rough forms and in their cut/polished forms. If you’re really science-minded, look at the elemental composition of those minerals. If I lost you back at “examine it,” simply look at the texture, color, and perhaps design, considering that this one rock you’re looking at is just one sample of a world of variety. Now, remember that this is just a rock. A non-living rock. How much more wonderful is the miracle of life!

“I will praise You; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are marvelous and my soul knows it very well.”

- Psa 139:14

“What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

- Albert Einstein

P.S. The toilet is fixed.