“My foot is tenon'd and died in granite… and I know the length of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what the stone teaches about trusting time.
It soothes your grief to know that the amazing red rock you pick up on the beach is hematite – the oxidation of iron in sedimentary rock, the same iron that binds hemoglobin that makes red blood cells carry oxygen; knowing that one day far away in eons, someone will stoop in wonder from another sea to pick up the little crimson-bound stone that was once your blood. It's more than comfort — it's dedication. The word “holy” shares its Latin root with “whole” and has its Indo-European origins in the idea of the unity of all things. This is holy, this is holy. To feel part of the relative order of all. To touch the wrist of the world for a moment, to feel the pulse of life's blood passing through it, to feel that you are a wrist and a miracle.
Rachel Carson wrote: “Residues are the world's most famous form of poetry. To know that you carry sediment in your cells and that you will return to the wild is to be a living poem.”
Laura Poppick offers a wonderful portal on this dimension of time Strata: Stories of Deep Time (public library) – a great addition to my favorite books of 2025.
Recounting a shift in perspective while climbing Wyoming's Bighorn Canyon under the weight of global environmental and political turmoil, he writes:
As I sat on that pale plain with my legs under me… I remembered that stability had come and gone many times before now. Those geologic timelines are too broad to bear witness to a single human lifetime, but they've been drifting into some kind of new stasis. I knew that this did not allow us to separate, or it meant that it was time to stop correcting our mistakes in the environment. The changes we have introduced today are happening much faster than previous transitions, and they were geographically inevitable. We are agents of this age. But the strata reminded me that we are also part of the Earth system, this vast web of connections that connects the atmosphere, continents, water, ice, and life. That these strings loosen and tighten over time and accept each other with more intelligence than the human mind can easily comprehend. That we live within this system, and the system lives within us. We carry its metal in our blood and its star in our bones, and its power is our power because we are it.
We are, but we are not given. Only the change and the containing circle are given.
Holding space soothes the pain of separation. Echoing John Muir's insistence that “if we try to pick anything apart, we find it attached to everything else in the universe,” Poppick paints the environment in its radiant, glittering perfection:
Air, rock, water, life, and ice all interact in a web of feedback loops that geoscientists call the Earth system. Together, the five elements of this system – atmosphere (air), lithosphere (rock), hydrosphere (water), biosphere (life), and cryosphere (ice) – organize the global climate and, in turn, the foundations of our life. It is through understanding this system that I have grown to see the physical world not as the static background of our daily experience but as an ever-changing vessel that moves and responds to countless changes, and has been doing so for billions of years. Over time, these subtle changes build, erode, and rebuild the world. We live our lives within recycled environments and those recycled environments live within us.
I mean this literally, not figuratively. Science is poetry and poetry is science. Everything on this planet is connected to everything else, from the tiny particles in the air we breathe to the massive movement of continents and ocean currents. You can't build a mountain range without changing the atmosphere, at least a little (because newly formed mountains absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), and you can't change the atmosphere without changing the chemistry of the ocean (because the ocean absorbs and releases carbon dioxide), and you can't change the ocean without affecting the life in it.
It is strange that, to connect with all this change, to see in the sea the memory of the mountains and in the mountains the memory of the Earth, is to remember eternity for you. Describing a rainy visit to a “golden spike” – an outcrop whose strata represent a transition from one geological period to another – Poppick writes:
The traces of the early Cambrian remained unblinking under the rain, telling us with wordless wisdom that there are beginnings and that there are ends and that the fibers of the planet will always harden and soften and melt and form again. That our heritage, one day, will wash away back to the sea.
[…]
The gift of geology is the opportunity to seek refuge in this constant, in the gravity of the arc of time. When I walk along the rocky shore near my home, I see not just stones thrown everywhere but a collection of stories and events directly related to our present and future.
[…]
If there is one thing we can say with certainty that has remained the same since at least the Archean, it is the continuous drawing of water into the rock and the erosion that comes with it. The skin and bones of the Earth are breaking down to make room for something new. Movement is not instantaneous and is a persistent force for change. It carves cobblestones into cobblestones into sands, mud, clay. It turns the land into dust and returns its debris to the sea from which it came. When today's oceans rise above the seas like cliffs or mountain peaks, our individual lives will be specks of dust, invisible to the physical eye. The iron in our blood will then be combined back into the earth, all our remains dissolved within the mantle where we will meet, again, as one.
He is a completer Strata with geologist turned psychologist Ruth Allen on the twelve types of time and geologist Marcia Bjornerud's love letter to the wisdom of rocks, then revisits Oliver Sacks on deep time and cosmic connectivity.
