Candles in the mud

The earth speaks

Selenite – the crystal form of Gypsum. Named for Selene the Moon. Formed as an evaporative mineral or in hydrothermal veins through volcanic activity.

It’s hard to believe now but the sleepy hamlet of Low Burnham was once, in the mid-nineteenth century, home to a gypsum extraction and processing plant. The mineral was extracted from clay, left millennia ago by the retreat of the great saline Lake Humber. The mineral was processed at a steam powered mill sited near the Low Burnham Beck. The only remnants of the business now are the pieces of gypsum which can be found lying around the fields near the Beck on any walk there today.

Last week I walked through the field and brought one of the broken columns of the white mineral home with me. When I listened to its story, these are the words it spoke.

We were born from water and the earth, formed in the womb of the great lake which followed the retreat of the ice. We were salt and crystal and air and water. Forces of nature formed us. We had no say in the process. Inexorable change shaped us, gave us life – if you consider us alive? What we are is unique.

You give us names, ascribe formulae, describe us with scientific words. CaSO4.2H2O.  You name us but you couldn’t make us. We are layers and sediments, strata, minerals and particles.  You say we are ‘the result of evaporative processes’. Maybe you could say we are a by-product. The way we are all by-products. Formed by forces we can’t control. Which of you chose to be formed in your mother’s womb? You are as much a child of changing circumstance as we are.

By-products we may be but we have been sought after. After millennia in the quiet earth we were hunted, the earth scraped and gouged and turned aside. They called it mining. They delved and dug, alert for the gleam of white. We maintain our purity even in the dirt.

We were mined and broken and re-formed. This time the forces that shaped us were human, making us serve them, their homes and their crops. They took our bodies from the earth and shaped us for their own ends, utility and economy, though maybe they found us beautiful?

The fever to mine us passed and those of us who remained were scattered, abandoned, forgotten. Perhaps our facets caught the light of the sun but there was no-one to notice. One year the farmer turns us under the earth with his plough, drives us to the surface the next. Decades pass. Rain falls, ice encases, mud stains. Occasionally we are picked up, set down, noticed because despite it all we still burn white, candles in the mud. History passes over us. Time, another force, inexorably carries us forward into a future we cannot know, fragments of a past which might have been a dream but for our broken bodies.

Look at us now, as we sit before you, white candles blazing in columns, easily split, powdering, splintering, becoming dust. For we all end as dust.