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Great Canadian Shield

Life is like water, spilling all over and often vanishing at no time. Time has no meaning on this bedrock without water.

North Shore of Lake Superior in Ontario.
I have trouble perceiving a landscape deprived of any life forms. My mind, I guess, was shaped by the world alive and populated by its meanings. The physicality of it concerned me only in the context of the weather conditions. For the natural world, this physicality must have lain at the core of life's existence.
As is, evidently, its seemingly endless time frame.
Science makes me believe that this rock surface covered with lichen could look like this almost 500 million years ago. As I traveled, the giant stretches of the Canadian Shield gave me previews of symbiotic relationships and their uncanny ability to retain water on the unforgiving rock surface.
Literally said, it's a matter of life and death.
Consequently, I realized that the “survival of the fittest" is an abused phrase. An excuse rather than the evidence I witnessed in the natural world. Everything out there seems to be about working relationships of some sort. The scale of it and its time frame is what my mind has trouble with. Well, it took time to iron out millions of details.
Shoreline of Georgian Bay with slowly receding plant life.
Despite millions of water pools scattered around, it is like being in a harsh desert. If the uncovered rock surface doesn't cool enough at night, the lack of water condensation on its surface prevents sustaining plant life between rain periods, and life is vanishing. The margins of life are indeed slim.
Great Canadian Shield environment after a prolonged drought and subsequent fire.
Stepping barefoot on the clean rock surface on a summer day, I instinctively search for a path with a plant life rock cover. Over the years, I acquired skills and behaviour patterns adequate for Shield's environments. Fitting into my head, the giant scale of everything happening there is still a work in progress.

The shield is the Petri dish of life coming ashore.

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