Old Growth

Perhaps life did not always exist on this planet. Yet at any time we can experience the results. Like it or not, it is the mysterious work of our own hands that returns to entertain us generation after generation in unthinkable shapes, colors, and forms. 

Maybe the image in my mind of this lonely blue marble (only half illuminated at any given moment) afloat in a vast and endless sea of darkness, leads me to ponder how it was that single-cell entities emerged that could so easily spin sunlight into substance. How is it a place that was once lifeless rock could make way for salt water, humpback whales, and scientists with neuston nets measuring the health of ocean ecosystems worldwide? Even now, we are the victory and battlefield all at once as life evolves in thriving layers accompanied by shifting shapes of a darkened hemisphere unleashed beneath us in all her disturbing splendor. And so this will be for a very long time.  

Anything else but

Perhaps we do not live by anything else but what is necessary. It is what rises in the trees, what lifts our arms and drives our hands to trace natural exchanges between distant oceans, rivers and clouds. It bathes us continuously and enters into us as bread, as wine, as fruit. It allows all human hearts to sing two notes at once – one rising, one falling, and is perhaps, in its diverse forms, the only thing in the universe that constitutes a force opposed to gravity.

Maybe when I am alone in the early morning, I am a deep quiet pool that allows this exchange to surface. It feels safe to be me, exactly where I want to be. The new day sends out a small wind, carries a bee along, lifts pollen from the grasses as the open cup of a poppy radiating with a coolness contained in the center of her stem beckons to the warm heart of a bird in search of her favorite nesting spot.