Big Picture Little Picture

One of our first stops at the petrified forest we saw little wood chips and chunks of logs. We were amazed at how wood-like they looked (see my last post) and also how common they were.

One of the next places we stopped was a lookout on a low plain where huge chunks of petrified logs scattered the landscape. It was pretty impressive, and once we went down in amongst them it was even more impressive because the ground was just covered with tiny pieces of petrified wood, absolutely covered!

Later in the week we went to another area where the complete logs were being eroded out in place and we could see just how long a single log could be.

It was really neat to see how the little picture (just how many wood chips there were) really made the big picture (the long logs) that much more impressive, because we knew that for each huge log there were that many tiny pieces. The reverse was cool too because understanding the larger picture of pretty much an entire forest of giant trees made us appreciate the beauty of each little fragment.

I feel like often people tel you to either smell the roses or look at the big picture... conflicting advice? but really it is both of those perspectives that make the other all the more meaningful and amazing.

Not Believing Our Eyes

For our honeymoon we went to Arizona for a week and spent much of the time in the Petrified National Forest. It was beautiful and deserty and warm and covered in petrified wood chips. Some of the petrified wood was beautiful bits of colored stone. What I usually think of when I think of petrified wood but what was far more impressive to Jeremy and I were the pieces of shattered stone that looked like modern wood chips, so much so that we felt compelled to pick them up over and over and over again just to drop them on the ground so they could hit their companions and "chink" against them in a very non wood-like sort of way.

Sometimes it looked like we had come across a freshly chopped log with wood chips all around.

Sometimes chunks of charcoal were scattered around.
But everytime my eyes were fooled and it was not wood.... at least it hadn't been wood in a very long time! And despite knowing the liklihood of these woodchips that I continually picked up would probably not be wood I still had to check and prove my eyes wrong.
How grateful I am for multiple senses to test things with and how grateful to know that sometimes my senses are fooled...