Pilgrim of time

I had never traveled in time before. Until this “deep time walk”, offered free this summer by my town. This apparently esoteric name hides an experience combining science and poetry*, born in 2007 in England, in the university cradle of ecological transition, Schumacher College.

I found myself among around fifteen residents from all walks of life for a three and a half hour narrated walk. Objective: to cover 4.6 km representing the 4.6 billion years of life of the Earth. The pond, which was the banal setting of my Sunday outings, was transformed into the medium of an embodied revision of my distant biology lessons.

With each step, we crossed, seemingly as if it were nothing, a million years! At the foot of a tree, at the edge of a path or an embankment, the presenter stopped at each important stage of the appearance of life on Earth to tell it: big bang, appearance of the oceans, of oxygen, Cambrian explosion, Jurassic period, great extinction, etc.

Little by little, I felt a new awareness growing of the dizzying gift that is life on Earth. Below, the pond sparkled in the last lights of the day.

At the very end, the host stretched out his arm and pointed to his hand: it was the size of time since the existence of Homo sapiens. His nail? Even greater than our history since the origin of writing. The silence that then fell among the participants was worth all the prayers for Creation.