# @spoonofsesame on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DODFCy1DvVH
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/59692363-spoonofsesame-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/9d3fc16f5d.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-09-01T05:36:00.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Christin Jely Gilbert (@spoonofsesame) — https://gondola.cc/spoonofsesame

## Caption

What do we carve into when life itself is fleeting? Run your palm against Nevada’s fire-colored stone and feel the story pulsing beneath 🪨🔥.

The petroglyphs scattered across the wilderness returned me to a child’s morning in East Java 🚲. I pedaled toward the mountain and found broken slabs at the foot of the hill. To my young eyes, the intact base resembled a fragment of gapura (gate) of ancient Hindu temples. A first glimpse of stone carrying memory in a home that unfolded between two worlds.

The taste of Mom’s chocolate hagelslag on buttered bread 🍞🍫 belonged to one, the call to prayer to another 🕌. Under the glow of an oil lamp, the looping lines of ꦲꦤꦕꦫꦏ (Hanacaraka), the old Javanese script flowed smooth across the page. Ink stained my fingers, spreading across the notebook until the world spilled past the classroom walls. A child’s hand pressing pen to paper became a seeker’s hand reaching for relics. 

These hands have since found their way through the chambers of Newgrange and wandered among artifacts where time rests behind glass. Now they trace the lines of the Valley of Fire and gaze across the wide Colorado Plateau.

The curling spirals and concentric circles feel like living connections, gestures of hope carved by human hands 🌀✋🏼. Across continents and centuries, these markings align human life with celestial events, solstices, equinoxes and star paths. Between the stars that burn for billions of years and the bodies that endure only decades, stories were carved into stone.

Each seemed different yet the carvings revealed a shared human desire: to align our brief lives with the rhythms of the cosmos and find continuity out of impermanence. Were they embodiments of memory, hope or defiance against time itself? Or were they a simple declaration of existence: we were here … we, too, belonged to the stars ✨?

Over two millennia ago, Heraclitus spoke of the cosmos as an ever-living fire, kindling and going out in measure. In this fleeting life, my palms keep reaching for the next stone✋🪨.

#ContemplativeWriting #SlowWriting #Impermanence #Heraclitus #ValleyOfFire #AmericanSouthwest #Petroglyphs #NevadaDesert

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## Tags

valleyoffire, slowwriting, heraclitus, americansouthwest, petroglyphs, contemplativewriting, nevadadesert, impermanence

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