I’m wearing colluvial sediment from the 90-million-year-old Iron Springs Formation in the wildlands behind my Utah home around my neck as an amulet. Yes, I’m still talking about soil and its components, in this case sandstone that is older than us and will outlive us. We need to start thinking in its rhythms rather than our own.

This is part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project. This sand protects me from the contaminated soils I grew up with, the ones that hold abuses, murders, exploitations, and a history of extractions, injections, disposals, and burials. I mean materials. I mean people. I mean culture itself.

This sand lets me look at that soil, a little at a time. My life is short. This suffering is long. It’s under our nails even if we can’t see it and has been in Oklahoma for nearly five hundred years.

Image: A silver globe memory locket filled with colluvial sediment from the Iron Springs Formation. The locket sits on a mesquite desk that’s out of focus in the background. Faint reflections are visible in the glass: points of light and a window that looks out on the laccolith near our home to the west.