Deep Time

Everyone knows the Earth is old. Almost nobody has walked it.

How it runs

1. Lay the rope across the longest open ground available. One end is the formation of the Earth; the other is now. On a fifty-metre rope, one metre is ninety million years.
2. Hand out event cards — first life, oxygen, first forests, the great extinctions, dinosaurs, the first flowers, mammals, primates, Homo sapiens, agriculture, writing, the steam engine, your grandmother’s birth.
3. Everyone places their card. They will get it badly wrong, and that is the session.
4. Walk the rope together from the beginning, correcting as you go, with a facilitator telling it as a story rather than a list.
5. The last centimetre. Agriculture, all recorded history, every empire, and every person any of us has heard of, occupy roughly the last two millimetres of a fifty-metre rope. Stand there. Say nothing for a while.
6. Then turn around and face the other way. The rope continues. Ask what the group wants to have been true, looking back at this moment from a long way along it.
7. Sit down where you are. Talk in threes.

Facilitator notes

• The turning around in step 6 is what makes this the north-east and not just the north. Without it you have left a group standing in awe with nowhere to put it.
• Do the arithmetic for your rope length in advance and write the positions on a card in your pocket.
• It is a very strong session to run in the hour before dusk.