Elements beat relentlessly upon you where you sit, partially embedded in the earth below, you perch at a tilt. With sun you glisten, with rain you’re slick, otherwise immune to the temporal conditions that come and go. Still, you sit as they visit then vanish. Cyclical and rhythmic. Things make homes within you and upon you. You hold their histories as you go, piece by piece into the world.

'And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.'

Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

`We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit.'

Robert MacFarlane, Underland: 37

I stand. Rough texture in tension with my sole. Grain pressing into arch. Miniature terrain in which the history of place is printed. Topography of time where skin meets surface.