Conversations with the Past

This is a book about geology, and my relationship with time and place. Four years ago my wife and family and I left our life in Canada to begin another in Southern Portugal. It was the most challenging transition that I have ever experienced. Faced with something larger than myself, I was drawn to the isolation and geology of the Costa Vincentina. For three years I woke up before first light, the sun peeking past coastal cliffs and solitary beaches. Each visit was a unique experience, and I began to understand it was also about a conversation between myself and this place, and the life I left behind. The rocks of the Costa Vincentina are roughly the same age or older than the Atlantic Ocean. Some of them come from before the super-continent of Pangaea broke up, during the upper Devonian period, some 350 million years ago. Faced with something this old, I found myself drawn away from the trials of my life. Even our collective catastrophes seemed small when compared to vastness of deep geologic time. There were lessons t o be learned - a conversation between myself and the past, that continues, as the present stretches out into the future.