What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.

Read this essay.

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