Jenny Odell on Reading the Rocks
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.
Spending time with a landscape opens us to the language it speaks. Can we quiet our own voices enough to hear what the Earth has to say? This week, Jenny Odell takes us on a walk through the folds and furrows of her Oakland neighborhood, listening for the memories embedded in the shape of her surroundings. Sensing the language of her local terrain, she begins to tune in to the age-old conversation between rock and water. By cultivating this sustained attention, Jenny shows how we can ask a place, as we would a person, what is your story?
Read the essay.
Art by Sophie Tivona.
________________________________
Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist, writer, and educator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Sierra Magazine. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, a New York Times bestseller; and Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond the Clock. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Marjorie Barrick Museum, Les Rencontres D’Arles, and Fotomuseum Antwerpen. She has been an artist in residence at the Internet Archive, the Recology dump in San Francisco, and the Montalvo Arts Center and has taught digital art at Stanford University.
Sophie Tivona is an Oakland-based illustrator and painter who grew up in gardens around the Bay Area. She uses the medium of watercolor to channel her close observations of the natural world. Her recent clients include: Rebbl, Harper Collins Design, Remedy Quarterly and UC Berkeley.
