Reply to comment

I enjoyed yesterday's session and thank Arlo for it.  I came away with many images in my mind, including of the way you can use a book to represent rock.  I also appreciate the idea that the earth has its own pulse.  Also striking to me was the idea that geology has to go around the world -- a wrap-around science -- to find things representing different eras.  The chronological story is told via spatial movement and collaboration. 

A question I have for Arlo, and others, is: what do you think are the implications of deep time for teaching people of various ages about environmental stewardship, sustainability, and so on?  Since humans can't control these vast time and change flows, what warrant do/can/should we have for environmentalism?  Love of earth?  Love of living things we share it with now?

The other thing I am hoping to continue talking about is what a "deep time perspective" in and of our lifespan might be, or be like.  I was saying to Anne at the end of the session that, to me, reading -- interpreting, which Martha Nussbaum calls "hovering" (also interesting in spatial terms) -- a poem, sometimes across years and contexts feels like deep time in that it's slow, not linear and fundamentally associative rather than comprehensive - a kind of spiraling in, out, and around, rather than a surrounding -- that kind of wrap-around. 

In the "starting positions" section of this evolving systems site, I shared some of my poetry.  I thought today that one poem is connected to what I am wondering about.  Here's the ending of it:

O Ink-eyed child lost to sleep, it is not
just the wind. Your mother loves you, but the daily news
is bad. It wastes her strength
and distances --
from carver's hand, to bowl, to sea, to child --
are large, and unreconciled.

I guess what I am asking is how thinking about, or with, deep time is a way to make more imaginative space for unreconciled distances -- not to reconcile them, but to do something else useful, interesting, and possibly helpful?