A Flower's Gift to the Gardener

Not many writers know how to be lyrical about rocks. Dana Hunter is a science-fiction writer who came to realize that creating worlds requires an understanding of planets when she signed up for a course on physical geography. There, a teacher named Jim Bennett and a simple day trip into the countryside opened her eyes to the meaning as well as the hidden beauty of the very landscape she had grown up in. Teachers live for thank-you notes like this:

"Some folks like to say that science takes all the beauty and meaning and wonder out of life. The only thing I can say to them is that they've never hopped in a van with their own Mr. Bennett and taken a wild ride through geologic history. They haven't been properly introduced to the landscapes around them. There is nothing more wonderful, meaningful or beautiful than watching the world form. They need that one experience that shows them the world as it was, is and one day might be."

Lots more where that came from on Hunter's blog In Tequila Es Verdad in a post titled "The Crash of Continents, The Whisper of Water."