In his 2016 book The Big Picture, Cal-Tech physicist Sean Carroll brought eternity and the cosmos down to Earth, so to speak, by noting that a contemporary human can expect to live for roughly 3 billion heartbeats. He wasn’t trying to be dour or morbid, just trying to help put our individual existence in the context of deep time, given that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and the Earth itself 4.5 billion years old, as best we can tell.
Maybe you don’t need a photographer to console you, to point out that a lot can happen in the time and space of a single heartbeat, or the blink of an eye in which a quality moment can transpire. But it’s true and there’s nothing more satisfying for a photographer than a well-focused instant of reflected light that reveals beauty, poignancy and perhaps a lasting hint of the eternal.
—-tjc
Red HIll at John Day Fossil Beds 
Canada geese at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ 
Ancient slab of Belt Basin argillite in a crib of Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River 
Magpie briefly still in a wintering locust tree 
River bank ice droplets, Spokane River 
Autumn at Tumwater canyon in the Washington Cascade range 
Flowing water and Grande Ronde basalt, Spokane River 
Autumn on the Spokane River west of Spokane 
Frost on the marsh, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge 
Clarno volcanic rock formation, John Day Fossil Beds 
Lichens on Grande Ronde basalt, Riverside State Park, WA 
Latah Creek near Spokane, WA 
Blue Darner dragonfly at a scabland marsh 
Ice age flood cobbles on Spokane River shoreline 
Young mule deer buck, Riverside State Park 
Water flowing over ice age flood cobbles 
Precambrian granite formation atop the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming 
Morning snowfall, Coeur d’Alene Park, Spokane, WA 
Winter at Soda Lake, north of Othello, WA 
Raindrops on lupine 
Saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert near Phoenix, AZ 
Ice age flood cobbles, Spokane River 
Sunset at the Granite Dells near Prescott, AZ 
Autumnal ash leaves, Fish Lake Trail in the Latah valley near Spokane, WA 
Schnebly Hill sandstone formation, Sedona, AZ 
Ice bobbins, Latah Creek
