Temporal Wanderlust

Afternoon meditations on imagination, fossils, and deep planetary time.

Ice Age Hunters, artist unknown.

Lately I've been revisiting Thomas Halliday's notion of "temporal wanderlust" in his excellent popular science writing, Otherlands. Shuttling books back and forth between our domestic space and the writing cabin here, Otherlands found itself beside William Irwin Thompson's Imaginary Landscape. Why yes, I thought, of course these two books are talking about something similar. In order to imagine the horizon of deep time, we need the imagination. We need story.