When we get there you might say we reached this point just about time. Just about time to realize there is not only one way going back. Not only one way going forward.

 

As Manuel De Landa describes in A “Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History” running, flowing, pouring water works on our material world as a sorting machine, transporting mineral and other matter towards new destinations where they accumulate and in time create a new sedimentary solid. The relation between the density of the mineral matter and the properties of the water flow can be a way of spatially understanding time and change.

 

Like the fast pace of hard rain on hydrophobic soil eroded by extreme drought.

 

The still water in a partly artificial lake that have appeared in hollows created by human.

A disbanded quarry slowly being filled with water.

 

A tree buried in moist dirt. Water transporting mineral through the wood and letting every cell wall be replaced, until at last, the tree become a stone.

 

In time, everything is moved,

everything is renewed.

 

Like with the words of water by Astrida Neimanis “As watery, we experience ourselves less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies: I am a singular, dynamic whorl dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation.”

 

Water can function as a tool of preservation at the same time it is a tool of reconstruction or destruction.

 

When I got here I said we reached this point just about time.

Just about time to realize that it matters to what extent or in what pace the reshaping is happening.

And maybe,

that it is the human temporality that distinct us from the rest of nature.

 

Did we understand the speed and scale of a human life, in relation to other species?

The lack of sensing time in space or giving time the space it requires.

Have our way of architecting life made us lose understanding of time.

 

Mark Wigley writes “In an important sense, buildings do not stand on the solid ground of the site in which they appear but instead on the holes of extractions from all the distant grounds that do not appear. Architecture is lifted up by holes dispersed across the planet… As buildings rise in one place, a deadly net of holes, gaps, cracks, collapses, deficiencies, floods and famines appear elsewhere”

 

We should all know how it feels to walk on a new world.

Holes made by the bat of an eye, takes someone elses lifetime to heal.

And maybe this is a good time to stop.

 

Stop who extracts and who heals.

 

Fossilized material, sedimentary rocks, are one of the most tactile memories of my own perishability, of what has been here before me and what will go on being when I am gone.

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One day we will be those who lived a very long time ago.

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When we get there they might say we reached this point just about time.