“The soul’s made of stories, not atoms. Everything that ever happened to us. People we love, people we lost. People we found again against all the odds.”

-The Doctor, The Rings of Akhaten

These fossils were among my father’s most prized possessions. Now they are among mine. They are simultaneously fragile and resilient. They are impossibly ancient, almost beyond my reckoning. They are the material evidence of a life, however inconsequential, and they are part of the same story that includes the oatmeal I made for my daughter this morning for breakfast. They remind me that each life has the capacity to leave a mark and they call the question; what will my mark be?

As a boy, I remember my dad digging these out from time to time and telling me about finding them as a young man. I remember the light of eternity glinting in his eyes as he considered how unlikely it was that not only would these have survived millions of years, but that he would one day be their keeper. These holy relics now sit on a bookshelf in my office and they remind me every day that in the grand scheme of things we are each just a whisper in the great long story of time.

We would do well to whisper with gusto.