I remember the first time I walked a section of old-growth forest between plantations marked for audit—an early career project I hadn’t expected to change me in the way it did. The light filtered through the canopy in long, slanted pillars, illuminating dust motes and insect wings and the slow exhale of soil. To the untrained eye, it was simply a forest. But the deeper I moved into the understorey, the more the forest revealed itself as something else entirely...

Winter sun, thin and unforgiving. A compass set to north. A blunted pencil that left a moody graphite shine on the page. I stood on the flank of Ghaamsberg—the Black Mountain—not of Mordor, but of Aggeneys, where the air is a hard, clean sound and the rock keeps its own counsel. I traced the sweep of a syncline that had folded on itself long before humans had language for such things. One gesture across paper, millions of years compressed to a curve...