At our second What If the Park Dreamed Back Lab, each participant was asked to choose a local river rock as a kinship partner. It wasn’t just an icebreaker. It was an invitation to shift perspective — to enter the work alongside companions that have lived through ice ages, tectonic shifts, extinctions, and rebirths.
Holding a rock that might be 1.5 billion years old does something to your imagination. You realize: this partner has seen continents collide and drift apart. It has outlasted governments, borders, empires, even entire species. It carries memory in its very body — smoothed by water, fractured and fused over time.
And suddenly the questions change.
Instead of asking what’s possible in the next election cycle, I find myself asking what might endure for centuries. Instead of focusing on quick fixes, I start to wonder what repair looks like over deep time. Instead of thinking only of human voices, I begin to notice the stories already written in stone, soil, and river.
Here are five questions I carry from that encounter — questions I’d ask a billion-year-old friend:
What does belonging look like when borders move, but people remain?
Rocks have crossed oceans and mountain ranges without passports or militarized fences. They remind us that migration is natural, continuous, and older than any nation-state. What if our frameworks for immigration were measured against that kind of belonging?What patterns of the city will outlast us — and which deserve to?
Stones have been foundations, cobblestones, monuments, ruins. They have witnessed cities rise, fall, and rise again. What if we planned urban futures with an awareness of what crumbles, what holds, and what might be intentionally re-made?What does racial justice mean when measured in centuries, not election cycles?
Rocks carry layers, fractures, and pressure — records of harm and transformation. What if we understood justice as something that must be tended across generations, as patient and persistent as erosion, but also as powerful?What stories are written in your body that we humans keep forgetting to read?
The land itself holds memory — of rivers rerouted, forests cut, communities displaced. What if our policies and practices started by listening to those stories, treating land and stone as archives?What futures could we imagine together if human history wasn’t the only clock we followed?
Deep time asks us to decenter ourselves. To remember that humans are a brief moment in a much longer story. What if our visions of the future were shaped with humility — not by control, but by partnership with forces larger than us?
These questions don’t have simple answers. My rock doesn’t speak back in words. But in its weight and stillness, it reminds me: time is long, change is constant, and we are always beginners.
Perhaps that’s the gift of a billion-year-old collaborator: not answers, but perspective. A reminder that we can weave our futures differently when we stretch our timelines, loosen our grip, and learn to listen beyond ourselves.