Sitting with Stone
Finding Ourselves in Deep Time Pt 1
A lot of us are having a hard time imagining the future right now.
We feel the heat. We see the floods. We feel the weight of systems crumbling in real time—economies, climates, democracies, supply chains, certainties. The speed of change can make us feel breathless, disoriented, frozen. If the future feels more like a void than a vision, you’re not alone.
The good news is, there is a future where there is life. What that life is, and the degree that humans (and other charismatic species we’ve come to love, and those we also have failed to love) at least exist, and at most thrive, is a question that our lives will shape the answers to.
But we cannot make things better if we’re frozen. We cannot do what we came here to do if we’re stuck on the hamster wheel of urgency, fear, and perpetual distraction.
That hamster wheel a collective cultural temporal dynamic it’s all too easy to get stuck in. Joanna Macy speaks of this as a trauma response. She points to the immense collective wound of World War II—specifically the invention and use of atomic bombs—as a rupture in our species’ relationship with time. Though apocalyptic predictions have existed for centuries, this was different: for the first time, we had actually created the means to end most life on earth.
That knowledge split something open. And in the aftermath, our temporal awareness collapsed. Our ability to feel the past holding us and the future calling us forward was severed. We became trapped in a present of relentless motion—running from fear, toward a future we no longer trust to even exist. This hamster wheel precludes us from resting in the present, orienting through the past, or visioning a future that is worth living.
But that severance is not irreversible. It is not final.
There are ways back into time—into continuity, into belonging, into the long view that can reorient us toward care and commitment to life itself. There are practices, simple, daily, embodied, that can help us root again. And there are books that are profoundly supportive in shifting our mental models to support these embodied practices. This is an invitation to come home to your center in the real, resilient rhythms of the living world.
This is the first in a series I will be writing of practices (and some complementary books) to help us find ourselves through regenerating our relationship with deep time.
The practice I’m sharing about today is sitting on stone.
Before we continue, I’m curious: when presented with the idea of sitting on stone, does a memory come to mind? Perhaps there’s a spot on a mountain, or by a river, warmed by the sun, or bathed in moonlight, maybe in childhood, or just last week. Perhaps it’s something you can imagine more than remember. Connect with that place, that feeling, with all of your senses for a moment.
Try this out as you are reading this in your imagination, but then please, go outside. Find a spot. Practice this in reality, with your body meeting the body of the earth with full presence.
Find a rock. A large one, if possible. One that has witnessed storms and sun, footsteps and stillness. One you can sit on with your full weight and feel the density of deep time beneath and all around you. Let your spine rest. Let your breath slow.
Begin to drop in to the life span of this stone, what it might have witnessed, what it might have gone through Let your mind stretch across millennia.
Ask yourself, “If this stone had consciousness, what would it’s life be like? How might it think? What might it feel right now? What wisdom might it have for me?“
Give yourself time.
And then, “What can I offer to this ancient stone? What can I give it in gratitude for this moment, for sharing this space and time? How can I be in reciprocity?“
This is a practice of geological empathy. Of time travel. Of re-membering ourselves into the story of the earth.
When I do this, I feel my system shift. I receive something different each time.
I have felt how brief I am, how blessedly small. I have felt how eternal I am as a living extension of the living world. I feel the absurdity of so much that spins us out in this world—and the sacredness of what remains. The rock asks nothing of me, yet holds me anyway. It reminds me: I belong to something older and slower than the current model of civilization.
And when I remember that, I feel that in some way I am stoking the flame of the soul of the world, keeping something alive by tending to my own soul through this unique form of deep relationship.
Writing this, I am recalling so many different places I have practiced this. On volcanoes and mountaintops. In ancient riverbeds and beside waterfalls. In the backyards of friend’s homes. I think I did this intuitively as a child, and I imagine you did too.
Now, I live in Florida, a land with unique geology and not many ancient stones at the surface where we can reach them. Here, the rock lies beneath the sandy soil—a porous composite of limestone, ancient coral reef, coquina, and sand. The land that holds me, the rocky aquifer beneath my home that provides my family with water each day, was shaped over millions of years by ocean tides, ice ages, and at least 12,000 years of human life lived in relationship with this land and lagoon—before European conquest marked the end of one world, and the violent beginning of another.
This is a sober lesson I am reminded of every time I connect deeply with indigenous teachers and friends. That colonization was in so many ways an apocalypse, a total collapse of a whole and often thriving system of life. Colonization, capitalism, and climate change have and continue to wreak devastation, and yet life, their lives, continue, and the wisdom of their lifeways is accessible now. We can remember. We can learn. We can live differently than the limited range of disconnected “comfort” that modernity offers some of us at the expense of all others.
“I do not pay attention to the world ending. The world has ended for me many times, and began again in the morning.”
— Nayyirah Waheed
Whether conveyed through poetry, as above, or through the hard fact of there being 5 major extinction events beginning 444 million years ago, and still, look around. Look at your own hands. Life, still. And the fact that we are living means that we do get to help shape what comes next.
If you sense that an ending to the way things are is unfolding, please remember that every ending is a beginning. On a human timescale, we carry within us countless endings: moments shattered as ecologies shift, systems collapse, relationships unravel. But when we rest in deep time, whether sitting on stone, dropping into tree roots, singing with the stars, gazing at light on water, we remember that each ending is part of a longer story.
On a geological scale, humanity itself is a flash of time. But within that flash lies a unique capacity to be agents of deep regeneration rooted in the meaning we find in our relationship with the living world, tending to the spark of care, courage, and clarity that our time needs.
In practice:
Find a rock, sit with it.
Breathe deeply and slowly until you can sense the ancient rhythms that exceed collapse.
Feel the regenerative nature of deep time, deep relationship, deep ecology.
Ask questions. Receive memory. Return to your wisdom.
Then, when you rise from that seat, carry yourself forward with gentleness and intention. Become the kind of ancestor the future needs.
Through somatic, spiritual, and poetic practice, we can stretch our imaginations outward, inward, down. We can feel for the deep past, listen for the future, and find ourselves precisely in the middle—not as helpless bystanders, but as active participants in the story of transformation.
This is what deep time practice is about. It is not abstract. It is not a thought experiment. It is a way of remembering who we are.
Reading into Deep Time
As part of this series, I’ll be recommending books that support our return to deep time. Some will remain constants, others may shift based on the focus of each essay. Today, stones, upcoming will include water, stars, ancestors, trees, and more.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
A foundational text I return to often and recommend widely. This book is composed of dreamlike vignettes, each exploring a different model of time. The chapters are short and simple which makes them perfect for reading to yourself or a loved one before bed and letting the dreamtime absorb these alternate temporal logics. Over time, it gently unhooks you from linearity and opens the door to new possibilities for how time might feel, stretch, and move.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Less well-known than A Wrinkle in Time, but even more potent for those of us working with time as a lived field. Much of this novel unfolds while Charles Wallace lays on a rock under the stars, traveling through time by entering the consciousness of people who lived in that same place across millennia. It’s a powerful meditation on how subtle choices ripple across time, and how tending to one thread with care can shift the larger weave.
Coming Back to Life by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown
This is the main introduction to Macy’s body of work I recommend, and to living systems thinking as a whole. The practices involve reconnecting with the ancestors, descendants, and the more-than-human world are very supportive to any deep time practice. This is a core text of the Work That Reconnects, and a deeply grounding tool for those seeking to engage in transformational presence and service.
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
This is not a book you read to “understand” in a conventional sense, it’s a relational encounter. Through Indigenous story, symbol, and epistemology, Yunkaporta invites us to think in spirals, to feel the weight of place, and to remember that time is held in land, language, and kinship. Essential for decolonizing how we think about time and reality.
EarthDance by Elisabet Sahtouris
A sweeping exploration of Earth as a living, evolving being. Sahtouris weaves biology, cosmology, and systems thinking into a mythic-scientific narrative that invites us to feel part of the evolutionary dance. This book anchors us in the very long arc—beyond culture, beyond species—reminding us that life evolves toward greater complexity through crises, not around them.
The Fourth Turning & The Fourth Turning Is Now by Strauss & Howe
While these work at a much smaller time scale—roughly 80-100 year cycles—they’ve been deeply clarifying for me in understanding where we are in the great arc of societal change. These books offer a framework for making sense of the generational roles we each inhabit, and how we might engage with the collapse and regeneration already unfolding. They remind us that time has patterns—and those patterns offer clues about how to show up.
And finally, a short film that brings us into this as unique, playful art:
This was the best thing I have read in a long long time. I saved it to come back to. Thank you so much.
I needed this... I miss the big rock at my mom's house overlooking the valley and the bluff stretching into the Indian ocean of the Wild Coast. Where I would sit for hours in a part of the rock that was just perfectly indented to hold me. I read so many books there, and it never felt urgent or rushed.
Thank you for surfacing this memory.