An Epiphany

Years ago I signed up for a degree in geology.  I had always been interested in rocks, minerals and landscapes. Little did I know where that journey would take me, not only in the geology class, but for many years thereafter. Many of our weekends were spent exploring the areas around our town, looking at gorges, beaches, sand dunes, dolerite intrusions and ancient glacial deposits.  In the laboratory we peered down microscopes at thin sections of rocks, identifying the minerals therein and interpreting their formation.  We dug through thousands of hand specimens of minerals and fossil bivalves and trilobites – a strange creature that used to scuttle around the floors of Cambrian and Ordovician seas.  In our university vacations we were out in wild places mapping geological formations.  I was hooked.

After that I went travelling, and much of travel entailed chasing down some of the classics of geology – the San Andreas Fault, the Southern Alps of New Zealand with their soaring peaks and glaciers, Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef, the volcanoes of Lombok, Bali and Java, and the high passes of the Himalayas.  The Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater, and dozens of other places besides. Work also took me to some wonderful places – tunnels in the Italian Dolomites, the heat of Tete Province in Mozambique, the palm fringed shores of Pemba.

I am sure that you would also love to go on grand adventures to amazing places, and you can.  Keep on reading to find out how.

That all sounds fantastic.  But there is another side to this story.  I was sitting during the Covid 19 lockdown at my kitchen table, checking my emails and contemplating a cup of coffee.  The light was streaming through the huge window that looks out onto my garden which was winding down into winter and I was grateful that I wasn’t stuck in a tiny apartment in Milan or Sao Paolo. 

But I got to the third one in time, and it was fantastic.

Ping, in came an email, which turned out to be from Peter Carruthers, my business guru who I have been following for many years.  So I always open his emails, because there is invariably some nugget of information.  And in his email, he wrote persuasively that we need to take our businesses online as much as possible during these crazy days, and as token of solidarity he would present a four-day webinar on how to do this – free of charge.  I signed up and forgot about it, and then had to watch the first two webinars after the event because I didn’t attend.  But I got to the third one in time, and it was fantastic.  Not so much in terms of the technical stuff, because I had already spent a great deal of time with the nuts and bolts of building websites and so on, but with the philosophy and the inspiration.  I was back in the game.

My issue though, was how do I take geology online.  I am wedded to the Earth so to speak.   I have spent months of my life on drilling rigs logging cores, or next to excavators sampling soils, or walking and mapping geological formations. 

Ping (the second one that week) the lights went on.  For many years now I had been blogging on things geological, but hadn’t got much traction because I wasn’t doing it enough, I discovered.  I had also written a series of articles on the geological history of our province for one of the broadsheets and they had given me half a page.  I had built dinosaur – a half sized T Rex, which they also splashed across the front page of the newspaper.  I was vaguely famous.

Marmaduke the T Rex went on tour to my office, to a national arts festival and to the country’s premier agricultural show.  The kids loved him.  We were the best stand at the arts festival – or so the kids thought anyway. The long and short of it was that I had been engaging with the public for years, doing the things which I loved.

But I was also running my own consulting firm, finding work, filling in forms, sending out proposals, dealing with staff, paying rent, insurances, accountants and the myriad of other things that sucked up so much of my time.  Very little geology in that, and certainly no time to go and grand jaunts to visit amazing geological features.  It was breaking my heart to be honest, but I kept at it because I had to pay salaries and keep the whole show on the road.  Ugh.  I just wanted to fire myself from my own business.  I wanted to write, take the dinosaur out on palaeontological adventures, engage with the schools and do the things that got me to sign up for this geology thing in the first place.

Then trouble came along. A very beautiful woman, big hair tamed in whimsical stacks by multi-coloured clips and bows, was always to be found in her studio painting amazing pictures.  Kids rolled through the studio, as did half the neighbourhood, and the kettle was rarely off the boil.  Little Ollie, the Yorkshire terrier, sat at her feet or followed her around like a shadow.  Then she got sick and we spent the next four years waging war.  We took inspiration from a book called “Her” which tells of the story of Psyche and her task of journeying into the underworld to bring home a box that contained a dose of the beauty of Proserpina, queen of the underworld.  Psyche had to avoid all the distractions along the way, hoarding her two pennies which were needed pay the Ferryman for her trips across the River Styx. Eros, who loved her deeply, had to follow her into Hades to rescue her after she opened the box, causing her to fall into a deep sleep from which she would never have woken.  That was Andre’s journey, and also mine - a journey into a dark and terrible underworld, and we never got to pay the Ferryman his other penny.  We lost her.

I was exhausted after that – physically, mentally and emotionally, and it made me realise that life is precious, life is short, and life can disappear at a stroke.  And so I resolved to do things differently and live life to the full.  But it wasn’t so easy, with a business to run and staff to pay, and clients who relied on our services.  I also found inspiration from the sister book of “Her” called “Him”, which frames manhood in Arthurian legend – starting out as a young knight errant, looking for dragons to slay and damsels to save.  And just when you think you have arrived in life - King Arthur sitting at your very own Round Table -  in comes an old witch to pour scorn on you, and tell you that everything you have done in life accounts for nothing.  Thereafter you realise that life’s real journey is that of contribution and service, and the destination was there all along, you just had to go down the road, across the bridge and take the first left turn.

To tell stories of climbing Indonesian volcanoes

Which brings me back to you.  I watched Peter Carruthers webinar and the lights went on.  I knew suddenly how I could serve more people.  All that stuff I had been doing before – blogs, newspaper articles, dinosaurs, school visits – was preparation for this day.  I realised that I could bring all of my geological training, experience, and stories into the classroom via online methods.  Not only to assist with teaching material, but to tell stories of climbing Indonesian volcanoes, getting stuck in the salt pans of Botswana to standing in blizzards in eastern Europe.  Kids love that kind of stuff.

My aim is to inspire - to inspire you, to inspire your students

So I am now able to reach out to you, and one of the ways is via this website, where I post up all sorts of things geographical.  But it is more than that.  My aim is to inspire - to inspire you, to inspire your students, and in doing so, to inspire myself.

It is for everyone – from Grade 9 to Grade 12 (Form 2 to Form 6) – because we need to catch everyone in the net.  We need more geographers, we need more environmentalists, we need more informed policy, and how better to do it than to take our youngsters and set them on a path to fulfilling careers.  We can’t afford to have our students going off and pursuing careers that don’t help our planet.  If we can make geography exciting and engaging then we will have no problem achieving our goal.  Our precious planet desperately needs all the help it can get.

The next generation of Geo Rockers

So here at Rock and Sky, we are building the next generation of geographers.  A tribe who is engaged, passionate and committed to building and extending geographical knowledge.  If you want to be part of this endeavour and want stay informed as I make my way through the world reporting back on ‘all things geographical’ please join us.

Find you on the inside.

Kind regards

Gerald Davie

A promise:  No spam, no nonsense, no funny stuff.  And certainly no sharing of details with 3rd parties.