…the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation — a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews — but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away — all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.

∆ Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift. […] The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had. […] We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

∆ Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“Most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way toward the sacred, that the sacred lies in the distance, that if we can leave the mundane and the banal behind then we will find the sacred. But I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive than just something that is exterior to the conditions we want to leave behind…

I feel invited, I feel lead and inspired to ask if quietude, if rest, if fugitivity isn’t a space of reckoning with the banal, isn’t a space of teasing out the sacred from the mundane, isn’t a space of actually noticing that our imagination of what the sacred looks like actually gets in the way of our transformation … and that we can be enlisted in ways that are surprising and unexpected, to slow down.

And it is not our work to do that, to come up with a final answer for how to do that. It is our work to be ready for when it calls us.”