My Year with Bluestone: Brief Lyrical Interlude about Time

I took this photo at the cemetery last week: lichen on bluestone. I love the contiguity of patterns here: a lovely symmetry of little bubbles in the stone under the layer of little flowers in the lichen. The lichen looks as if it has been dropped — splat! splat! — onto the rock from a giant ladle but of course it has grown by spreading out, incrementally, over the surface in thin, widening and conjoining circles. At first glance it looks like a contrast between informal, spontaneous, organic growth — the colour of pale new spring; and an unyielding, formal, institutional surface — the dark grey of heritage time. And in once sense that's true. But the stone, now cut into in a rectangular block, was once part of a molten red volcanic flow, moving and bubbling much faster than lichen could ever grow. And in a cemetery? Time capsules everywhere.