The wonderful GreenSpirit Walking Break in late Spring of 2022 provided a happy coincidence for me. Our location at Monckton Wyld was very close to Dorset’s fascinating ‘Jurassic’ coast, and came just as I was reading the final chapter of ‘Otherlands’. In this superb book, the palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Thomas Halliday takes the reader back to specific times and places over the past 550 million years of Earth’s history (the period of complex multi-cellular life and just one eighth of the total 4.6 billion). The Dorset coast, ‘Otherlands’ and walking in Nature with fellow GreenSpirits (plus mainly sunny weather) made me feel very open to all that ‘Deep Time’ offered, open to the astonishing journey that the Earth has been on. There is a real joy in knowing one is part of something so magnificent – but in what way is it ‘spiritual’? The following paragraphs will, hopefully, help to explain.

Catherine Hutchison writes about a workshop she attended on the Universe Story (the story as revealed by Science from the Big Bang to the present day) in Australia and why understanding the Universe Story is so important for our human evolution.