Understanding Marble: From Limestone to Lifelong Growth
Yesterday, I visited a place in the Rockies where limestone is transformed into marble.
It was a heck of trip over the mountains on a forest service road from Crested Butte to Marble, but worth the effort.
But what is marble, exactly?
Marble starts out from limestone. Limestone is the accumulation of life that has been hardened into sedimentary rock made up of mostly calcium carbonate.
Millions of years ago, the sea covered this area, and the tiny skeletons of gazillions of sea creatures hit the ocean floor and eventually hardened into limestone.
Limestone is a very porous material… soft and brittle.
But here’s where the magic happens. Slowly, with time, it is transformed into marble with extreme heat and pressure. It becomes compacted into a crystalline structure that is very strong and can withstand transformation.
It can then be cut, carved, shaped, and polished into anything a master builder or craftsman can imagine, and it transcends from rock to something that appears to almost be alive because it holds light.
Now, I know that what God puts in front of me is significant and mirrors what is going on in my own life.
This morning, I was wondering, “Why marble?”
So I thought about it and realized that my life experiences stack up like layers of sedimentary rock, and when I face the pressures and heat of daily challenges, with time, those layers can slowly harden and change—shaping me into my own kind of marble.
I can take that refined aspect of myself and shape it into what desire, like a craftsman.
The kicker is…it can only happen if I surrender to the process and don’t fight the changes that inevitably happen with those three ingredients: time, pressure and heat.
I’ve had periods in my life where I’ve chosen to ignore them…whether it was giving myself time to experience what I need to understand something important, or avoiding an emotional situation because it was probably going to result in pain.
Dealing with pressure is an ingredient that I see many people struggle with, too. Myself included.
We all have our individual limestone base, don’t we?
We have different experiences that settle to the floor of our soul, waiting to be transformed into something stronger and ‘more’ of itself.
But how that limestone becomes marble still requires time, pressure and heat. That’s universal.
But if we choose to avoid one, two or all three of the those ingredients in our lifetime, we remain brittle and soft.
Our limestone doesn’t get to transform, and that’s a tragedy.
Here’s some pics of the day…Marble, Colorado is a small place, with a mighty message.
Random fact about me: It took me 6 months to summon up the courage to work with a torch in my job as a jewelry designer. Fire and gas scared the shit out of me.