Learning to read the storylines of Earth’s history directly from rocks can help to provide a feeling of embeddedness in the cosmos, a sense of continuity and kinship with past and future. Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of geologic thinking is the practice of roaming freely across many scales in space and time. In doing so, we can see ourselves in miniature, part of a long lineage of creatures on a creative planet that has renewed itself for more than four billion years while keeping an idiosyncratic diary of its activities over time in the form of rocks. Rocks assure us that the past is no less real than the present.