‘Weathering’: How geological limits help us reflect on our own tricky relationship with boundaries

It rains a lot here in the wettest place on earth. Months and months of steady, unrelenting rain, falling on our rooftops, falling on our hills. I’ve imagined it as many things – a singer of lullabies, a bringer of stories, a re-filler of our rivers, a greener of our forests, a conjurer of mist and mold—but never quite as an active agent of change, physically shaping our landscape, year after year, century after century. Perhaps this is proof of “geological blindness”, a term that describes how most of us are unaware of or don’t nearly enough appreciate the significance of geological features and intricate geological processes, quietly continuing around us in the natural world. But rain does weather a place. It dislodges and erodes, it chemically reacts, it freezes and frosts and forces apart, it thaws, it dissolves.

Weathered by life

And I’ve been learning about this and more over the last few months, guided by a slew of books. Everything by American geologist Marcia Bjornerud, and more recently, Weathering: How the Earth’s Deep Wisdom Can Help Us Weather Life’s Storms by Ruth Allen. Weathering, in geological terms, describes the wearing down or breaking up of rocks while they are in place – through biological processes...

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