If you know about what’s in the image above, don’t tell anyone what they are until we get to the end. This is a moment to enjoy real wonder and a sense of our smallness. Because what’s in this picture are a very big deal––like time travelers or things from another universe. They don’t look like much, I know. But wow. It’s amazing that these exist.

We can start with the “where” –– this is Shark Bay in Western Australia. It’s a unique, out of the way body of water in a part of Australia. It’s not the kind of place people travel to just to see the bay. But after you know what’s there, you can understand why it would be worth the trip.

The clumps in this picture are stromatolites, and stromatolites are, perhaps, the oldest forms of life that still exist on the earth. They are so old that calling them “living fossils” doesn’t even quite capture it. These are living foundations, having their hayday around 1.25 billion years ago.

They were old when the Cambrian explosion happened that proliferated a range of new animal types and is so famous as the part where the fossil record really explodes with diversity. In fact, Stromatolites were probably grazed on to functional extinction by these new animals. They should be long-dead parts in the fossil record. But they are around in a very few, tucked away places in the world where water conditions allowed them to survive. They are a miracle.

The other thing they are is a community. Stromatolites are colonies of bacteria that cooperated to build mineral-rich structures where they thrived together. In the process they helped oxygenate the planet and built a way of life that has survived for a billion years. A community did that.

What might our community do?

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD

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