To celebrate our 500th post on BigShotsNow we are republishing some of our more popular posts. This post first appeared on January 5th 2014. If you have any suggestions of previous posts you’d like to see again drop a note to dlutsey@enchantedpixels.com and we’ll try and honor that request.

In Arches National park you can occasionally see the Old Ones going slowly about their business. They move quietly through the canyons of stone intent on their purpose and pay little attention to the soft mortals that scurry ant-like about them. Their journeys are slow and ponderous seeming to us, but then we live in a world that travels in a headlong rush and we must accomplish much in the short period of time allotted to us for we have the desperate need to scratch our mark on the walls of time. Those in the future must know we passed through here. How temporary we must seem to her, if she even contemplates us at all.

Stone Woman Walking has been making this journey for eons. Wrapped in her blanket to ward off the chill of centuries she is not much affected by the ravages of time and little notices the conditions around her. Snow blankets her softly but is gone in moments. The sand-laden wind blowing through the canyons slowly erases her youth but it is of little import. She has had her time. Now the contentment that comes from her journey through the ages settles around her and enhances the constancy that is her beauty. She is not eternal, for all things pass, but she seems so to us. This somehow brings comfort to some of us as we see the fleeting moments that are our lives moving past us at an ever accelerating speed. There are things that last. There is purpose that will continue long after we have faded away. I like that.