@sbourne we see the end result of a massive stone broken off of a larger stone surface as glacial ice moved over the surface, and carried the stone far from point of origin. Eventually the ice melted, depositing the stone on the bed of what was once the glacier, and all the material underneath the ice became the fertile soil which gave birth to the forest. This is the story of that particular erratic stone.
To say it that way makes it sound like it could happen over the course of days, but this process took tens of thousands of years, four or five fold of the entirety of human history. This stone probably traveled no more than a few tens of meters per year while being carried by the glacial ice.
I imagine the stone itself being sentient but thinking at a very slow rate compared to how quickly we think. The stone doesn’t see night or day, it doesn’t see the sun as a distant sphere in the sky, rather it sees a solid bright streak of white light cutting a path from east to west, a streak that oscillates rapidly along the north-south axis of the sky as the earth rotates around the sun, experiencing a hundred years in what to us humans would feel like a few seconds. At that rate, the story of this stone would unfold as quickly as we made it seem from telling its story here in just a few words. At that rate, the forest would materialize in a few moments. At that rate, the animals all around it, including us, would feel like no more than bits of dust in the air.
