Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

David Ferrier is the author of Footprints, in Search of Future Fossils, a meditation on the Anthropocene,

and a search for the fossils that humans are leaving behind.

In this essay, David reflects on the material weight of human-made objects

and on the home as a structure that holds and records

the trace of our presence on the earth.

All houses have memory.

Life's big occasions, the triumphs and heartbreak, drift through like smoke, leaving barely a trace.

It's the small moments they remember.

The hollow at the turn of the stair, the scratches around the keyhole, or wood darkened by touch.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, wrote Annie Dillard,

and the houses we spend them in record it all.

Home is something we've all had to think about differently in these weightless days.

During times of lockdown, the pandemic has meant repurposing rooms with kitchens converted into

classrooms and bedrooms into offices. Others have been sunk in silence, empty of the usual traffic

of friends and relations.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called the house a psychic state,

stitching together the thoughts, dreams and memories from which our lives are braided.

For some it has been a refuge, for others a torment, but we have all in some way been confronted by where we spend our days.

In the last months of 2020, builders were pulling down walls in my home.

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