October, 2014
This mad still spinning world. It's a wonder we've made it this far. Through all those winter winds and first frosts felt by our ancestors long forgotten; what voices whispered with the woods, what stories spoken softly by the sparks, what lives longingly lived? What names they had, what games they played, what hopes they chased when gazing at the stars, or a thunderhead crashing, or those first sounds of an ocean crashing upon the shore? What would it have been like?! Without our textbooks and science to explain away all of Life's ageless wonders? What would it have been like, to stand in awe of a world unknowable, unconquerable?
Ten thousand lifetimes spent traversing by foot, by boat, by the compass of curiosity! Out of the savannas to the steppes and steeps, the plains and peaks, tirelessly venturing on and on, from father to son, mother to daughter, passing the torch to keep alight their stories... that magnifying glass of memory, the great legends they surely spoke of, the Spirits and Gods they gave breath to, their insatiable desires and agonies, all of them marked from birth with that lightning bolt of wanderlust.
How many lives we'll never know, can never even begin to imagine. How improbable, how impossible that they kept the torch lit for all those miles, across deserts and oceans and back again. Migrating with the winds and wilderbeasts so wondrous. The knowledge gleaned to sustain themselves through a hundred thousand winters! Countless generations passionately lived now gone, to place us here... How could this be? How did we ever make it this far?
Because we lived with the Earth. Because we were of the Earth. (And because Earth has avoided meteorites for quite some time).
