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

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality. We often don't recognize that the Earth has a story

that far precedes ours. Before we arrived on the scene, the Earth was already ancient beyond belief, shaped and reshaped

by tectonic upheavals, climate changes, and mass extinctions, and evolution the Earth has

meticulously archived in the strata and sediment beneath our feet.

In this narrated essay, author and geologist Marsha Bjournerud

orients us to read the many volume memoirs of our Earth. Through the churn and quake of the

planet's crust, the rise of great mountain belts, and the erosion of valleys and canyons,

the Earth offers a portal into geological time,

the rocky chronicle of time slow passage. Marsha calls us to celebrate the deep timefulness of

the earth, the four billion years of dynamism that have made this moment possible,

and wonders what might happen to our understanding of the past and the present

if we remember the stories that came before our human-centric one.

Could we glimpse, she asks, our ephemeral place in the vast labyrinth of time? Anyone born on Earth knows that our home is remarkable.

If you were prompted to think about what makes this planet so special, you might mention

the vast oceans and abundant oxygen, perhaps

the protective magnetic field, but an equally exceptional yet less obvious attribute is the way

that Earth preserves accessible records of countless earlier versions of itself, condensing

events of billions of years into the volume of the present-day continents.

In achieving this feat of compression, Earth effectively wrinkles time,

...