I am in love with geology

One of the best, most wonderful experiences of home ed is where it can take you. I don't mean the actual places as in map co-ordinates, and which field am I in now? but those places in your soul that you never knew existed and you only found because you have been driven there in an attempt to educate your children about the world.

And I do not mean the dark dark places of the soul that are filled up with guilt at doing an inadequate job, nor the inexplicable, powerless frustrations of anger because no matter how many times Squirrel is told to comb your hair, and brush your teeth she still does not do those things without threats of hairdressers and dentists. Nor is it the feeling of being overwhelmed by endless things that seem never complete, like cleaning the hallway and sweeping the floor; nor that dread hollow fear of all the predators and crazies in this world who one day might touch the lives of my treasured daughters. No, not all that depressing stuff. This place of the soul is the amazing place of Wow! So much wondrous amazing stuff in the world and I have such a short short time to live to discover it all!

Well Grit experiences the latter liberation today in the middle of a limestone quarry on a Sunday afternoon geology tour.

This probably has something to do with our guiding geologist, who doesn't just talk about her subject, she enthuses it, like the sort of fizz you might get if you drop an Alka Seltzer in a glass of champagne. And while this wonderful person is sparkling about fossils and millions-of-years old sediment and little shells that lived here and here, and how England was like Florida keys only with dinosaurs and look, you can see how currents moved backwards and forwards in the sea, year after year, scraping these patterns on this rock, then Grit is all knocked out, and would like to hug those limestone beauties and at least give them a big licky kiss just for being there and being so old and wise and amazing, and for showing me an ancient earth.

And better still, all the gritlets agree, and the days when they would drop to their knees in car parks and shovel gravel into their mouths and pockets suddenly make sense. Yes! That is what they were doing! They were filling their bodies and pockets and souls with as much crystal, silica, feldspar, dolerite and basalt as they possibly could in praise at the age of the earth and the wonderful thing that is rock.


And that is a picture of rock under a microscope, which in my book, is proof of beauty.