Welcome to Emergence Magazine Summer of Practice, a special series of guided audio practices. I'm Emanuel Von Lee, host of this podcast, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County.

Our ability to conceptualize great swaths of time is pretty limited.

Generally, we have a pretty grounded sense of what life has been like for the past century,

and can envision pretty comfortably what life will be like in the next 50 years or so. While this scale

accounts for three or four generations, it also leaves us blind to the deep past, the many

stories of the earth before our most recent moment. How can we update our sense of time to glimpse the tremendous

ancientness of the earth? How can we come to see how the earth has been here long before

we arrived in this story and will likely remain long, long after.

In this episode, we bring you the final time audio practice,

the fourth in a series that explores how we can come to dwell within a kind of time that is in relationship with the earth, rather than the confines of the clock.

This invitation is called ledgers in the land,

and draws your attention to the Earth's immense capacity

for recording the passage of time.

The planet's body, crust, rock, sediment and soil,

holds memories of the Earth's many changes.

Mountains, trees, water, and sequestered carbons

offer enduring testimonies to bygone geologic and technological ages.

In this way, the Earth is a great self-documenting archive,

one on which we too have inscribed our marks.

As our rapidly changing climate transforms the landscapes around us,

much of the past is once again becoming visible, reminding us that the

land is always recording, always remembering.

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