by Emily Arntsen

I don’t faint after waking up anymore, but I do somewhat regularly pass out from pain, from stress, and from drinking. The act of passing out is familiar to me, though I’m still mystified about what we pass out of and where we pass into when such incidents occur.

I often wonder what it really means to “see stars.” I know the scientific explanation is a lack of blood in the eyes that results in a random firing of signals between the retina and the brain—proof not only of poor circulation but of the fact that our eyes can see things that don’t exist.

But what if these supposedly random beams of light were actual images of stars that exploded long ago, residual memories pulled from the ancient well of knowledge that often lays dormant in the recesses of our minds, memories inherited from our single-celled ancestors that turned the ashes of stellar corpses and iron rain into the first breaths of oxygen that created life on Earth as we know it. The stars one sees before slipping out of reality’s grasp do not resemble the distant pinpricks of light that beam through the dark fabric of a night sky. These stars more closely resemble kaleidoscopes or the bulbous pink and blue clouds of supernovas—images of the original destruction that started our galaxy, the explosion that sent iron particles soaring through space to cluster at the Earth’s core, to hold the cardinal directions in place, and to feed the bacteria that created the atmosphere. The same violent act of fission that put iron at the center of the Earth put iron in the blood that regularly fails to reach my eyes, and as such, it’s no coincidence we “see stars” when we drift into unconsciousness. All are from stardust, and to stardust all return.

Living in the desert of the Southwest presents a similar confrontation with the origin story of Earth. Red is the dominant color of the iron-laden rocks. Here, “seeing red” does not mean that one is enraged but, rather, that one is seeing stars, or more accurately, the remnants of astral death that gave the Earth her structure and her molten blood.

In the valley where I live, the rust-red walls of sandstone stand so tall that, in the distortion of the moonlight, they appear to cave forward like tidal waves that harken back to the ocean that once flooded this thirsty plateau. As I traverse Paradox Valley, I cross the Dolores River, a current of water that runs not parallel but perpendicular to the canyon. Here, where the river crosses the valley, I am reminded of the ancient seas that ebbed and flowed for hundreds of millions of years until the continents split and the Sierra Nevadas rose in a convergence of rocks that trapped an inland ocean. I think of the hot winds that blew across the shallow sea, lifting the water and leaving the salt to form a weak and dusty flat that bowed over time in the form of an arch. In my mind’s eye, I see that layer of salt buried beneath thousands of feet of sediment. Under the weight of those fossilized sand dunes and that pink crystalline stone, I imagine the dome of salt collapsing, creating this valley—this paradox—independent of the river.

At the shores of the Great Salt Lake, I can see stout lumps of fossilized bacteria that consumed iron and expelled oxygen billions of years ago. As I peer at those globes of rock—stromatolites—beneath a shallow layer of salty water, the history of the formation of the atmosphere, the Earth’s longest ice age, and a mass extinction of all non-oxygen-using life forms unfolds, events spurred by the bacteria’s ferric diet.

On the banks of the Green River, I can sink bare feet into the silt and read the entirety of Earth’s history in the patterns of the strata that stripe the canyon walls. The upper layers of sandstone and limestone tell of the long-necked dinosaurs buried within its gray and pale red sediments, deposits of rock laid down by ancient rivers that would eventually be unearthed in this region to mine uranium ore. Below that, a lighter stripe of sandstone named for the Diné people tells of the gradual separation of continents that thrust the land upwards to form the San Rafael Swell. And below that, the pocked Kayenta sandstone tells of the salt waves and cold winds that hollowed out a honeycomb of stone at a time when Utah fell on the coast and the equator.

In the chasms of the high desert, one can wade into the history of time. The magnetic pull of the iron rocks beckons. Seekers come from far and wide in search of an unobscured horizon, in search of less and less until, in the contrast of an empty landscape, one can see oneself at last. In the vastness of the land and on the timeline of history, the outline of oneself is small, and therein lies the solace of geology and our own insignificance. With or without us, these celestial iron rocks persist. Here we see red. Here we see stars.

Emily Arntsen is a writer living in Moab, Utah, where she is ever grateful to the landscape and the people who inspire her stories. She grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, and misses the ocean dearly, though she finds comfort in the fossilized seashells of the Utah desert.