The Seed, Ingvi

Once upon a time, as all good stories begin…

Long, long ago, longer than the memories of stones, somewhere in the primordial star-dust soup of the primitive Earth, five elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus –  were electrified.

We do not know how or why the ancient lightning came, but we know it did. Because it left a very curious mark in the wordless record of Earth: Life.

Elements joined hands, formed chains of molecules, and these molecules, agitated by the storm-charge of the young atmosphere, began to replicate themselves in an insensate urge. Copy, copy, copy. Over vast eons, these self-replicating molecules became the instruction manual for new alliances. A phospho-lipid bi-layer. A cell wall. Semi-permeable membranes. 

Cells.

These cells began to eat. To consume one another in order to assimilate the chemical and photic energy of the young cosmos. 

Over even longer stretches of time, one visionary cell, rather than eating another and digesting it, entered into symbiosis with it. Together they were stronger, more energetic. Possibilities opened. And the mitochondria was born. The mitochondria that produces the chemical energy for you to walk in this forest today, those very mitochondria are the descendent copies of some of the earliest, free-living bacteria which joined the primitive eukaryotic cells. 

You are not yourself. Even in your cells. You are defined by community, even at the smallest division of your body. 

Separated by millenia, it happened again. A different rebel cell joined forces with a little, green, free-living mote. And the chlorophyll was born. All plants on Earth descend from this one, revolutionary ancestor. These trees all around you, they are their children. They, too are in-divisible, cannot be individuals, for if you cut the photosynthetic chlorophyll away, you have a dead plant cell. Neither can make a tree without the other.

Once the cells understood the power they had when they chose to work together, multicellular life forms were born and proliferated across land and sea. The exquisite vascular tissue, spores and flowering plants. The smallest aquatic life and the whales with four-chambered hearts the size of a wild boar. Legs. Wings. Reptiles and birds. And later, mammals.

So much creativity. 

All unfolding from a little lightning. A few atoms joining their electron hands.

Atoms that formed in the intense heat of collapsing stars.

You know the hemoglobin in your blood is able to carry its little cargo of oxygen because of iron born in a fusion reaction at the heart of an exhausted star. Life depends on death, always. Life eats death, tears it to shreds, and re-organizes it. 

You are star-dust, self-organizing. 

Light itself is the union of wave and particle. Fast-moving light is energy, radiation, heat. And when energy slows, it cools, it transforms into matter. There are no individuals. Even light itself is in-divisible.  

All the universe’s brilliant creativity is defined by union. And you, you are the perfect expression of the universe’s creativity.

For all of time, your ancestors, long before they were human hunter-gatherers eating their way through Eden, joined electron hands and released them in the unending fractal dance that is Life. 

Look at your body. Is it made according to the instructions inscribed over four-and-a-half billion years in the language of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus – which were themselves born in the death of untold-billion-year-old stars. You are already ancient. You are already reborn. There is no need to fear age and death.

The body-building code you see today was inscribed in your DNA over the 200,000 or so years that humanity wandered lightly across the land, gathering fruit here in spring, nuts there in fall. Do not despair that you find modernity stern and unyielding; you are perfectly created to be a peripatetic gardener of the savannahs. Humanity can change its environment, but we cannot change ourselves. Despair is natural to a caged bird.

Still, sing.

This time is but a blip in the cosmic order. It will pass. But the self-replicating light that forms you now, it cannot die. Because energy can be neither created nor destroyed in the universe. It can only change form.

And it must change form, always. Constantly, it flows. Energy that does not flow… becomes infinitely dense. Infinitely cold. 

So dance. Dance now. The divine light is your divine structure. It is perfect. 

As are you.