Tag Archives: Evolution

There may be such a thing as too much perspective

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Life has been on earth for five billion years.

We’ve seen five mass extinctions. We’re currently undergoing the sixth,.

There have been many geological and biological factors for the extinctions. The famous meteor impact. Volcanic activity. Thriving plants altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. Imbalanced ocean water. 

Have you ever looked up a video of the tectonic plates shifting? Landasses are just the dried pudding skin on top of a swirling hot ball of magma. Watch them float and mash into each other.  https://youtu.be/IlnwyAbczog 

I looked at Google maps today and zoomed out until I could see the earth as a globe. The land masses still look like liquid. They’re clearly made of a slow-flowing substance. Look at the tip of Africa. It’s crumpled.

How small we are. We run and scream and fret about the mess we’ve made of things. What absurd hubris. We aren’t the first and we won’t be the last. And unless something integral about us changes, we certainly will not survive as a species beyond another few hundred thousand years.

Only one thing is for sure: the algae always wins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Night River

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I’m learning so much from the WordPress community.  I just found out there’s a beautiful form which blends prose and haiku, called haibun. Naturally I had to give it a try. Here goes.

 

 

Night River

 

There is stillness on top of the water, though it swirls and currents underneath. The river is quiet and deep in the cooling summer night, the world in black and white.

My sister says that underneath the darkness swim a multitude of carp battling for survival, pushing out the native fish with their incessant hunger, rapid reproduction, excessive growth. But can a stillness so deep really house this dramatic abundance? How can so much life be unseen, unheard? They do not sing their vitality like land creatures.

 

Warm river surface

Reflects a perfect full moon

A ripple twitches

 

Two men have lines running into the heart of the black water. One of them has pulled a gar onto shore and extracted the hook. He doesn’t want it. He rolls it toward the water, loathe to touch it any more than necessary. It comes to rest on its back, long pale belly toward the sky, little flat fins like a baby shark. It wriggles slowly, blind and mute, struggling its way down across the gray wet clay toward the water. It stops short, its body too heavy to move, eyes unable to blink against the dry bright moonlight, simple mind utterly overwhelmed. The man pokes it again with his foot, its instinctive defenses are nothing here in the light air, it can only writhe in an empty hopeless way. We all want it to go back but we can’t bring ourselves to touch its mucousy skin. There is a smell to the river (does the water smell like fish or do the fish smell like water?). It is ameobal, the smell of primordial soup, algae, microscopic life, placenta.

 

Alienated

The water won’t keep us now

She has new children