The Art of Reconnection: Daniela Naomi Molnar and Marcia Bjornerud

In part two of “The Art of Reconnection,” series co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with guest Marcia Bjornerud about the narratives, notions of time, and deep wisdom embedded within rocks.

Marcia is a writer and a structural geologist whose scientific research, which focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building, has taken her around the globe. She is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and the LA Times. She is also the author of the books “Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World” and the recently published “Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.”

Throughout Marcia’s scientific and academic career, she has learned to listen to landscapes. She and Daniela discuss how the Western fallacies of objectivity and stability may act as a barrier to our innate capacity to notice landscapes not only with our instruments and hypotheses but also with our senses, our lived experiences, and our inherent curiosities.

Daniela is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. She makes large-scale abstract paintings with pigments she creates from plants, bones, stones, rainwater, and glacial melt. Gathered from specific biomes she has visited, these paints become palettes of place with which she investigates the earth’s site-specific capacity for both memory and resilience.

This conversation muses on the vast time scales of geologic change, the alienation and spiritual poverty of the modern Western world, and how careful listening to the slow-moving land may help rattle apart the cage of human exceptionalism that has plagued our current era. 

Daniela and Marcia also invite us to wonder: What memory does the ground beneath you hold? How does connecting with that story change your experience of the place? And what might it mean for our collective future if we adopted a more geo-centric vision of the world and our place in it?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.