I am probably a bit more preoccupied with time than I ought to be. Although, you can’t really blame me, because I am on the verge of flipping 75 years in May. One of the reasons I have been a fan of the Buddha for decades is because of his view about our mortality, which he casts in a positive, constructive light. According to the Big Guy, keeping it in mind, without making it a cast iron anchor of our untimely demise, is a kind of ubiquitous filter, giving our lives the ultimate context for our choices.
It is not like I need much help to trigger this corner of my consciousness, but a recent piece of science caught my eye. In some hard to pronounce locale in northern China, scientists discovered ancient fossils of green seaweed, clocking in at around one billion years old. Paleontology is definitely not my forte, so I immediately thought it must be a typo, confusing the “b” with an “m”. The wonderful thing about science is how important the details are, in spite of it recently being maligned by so many. Yes, these pressed lines in rock came with the “b” word attached.
I confess to being pretty damn selfish when it comes to measuring time. I’m not sure when I ever stopped to really think about how old our home actually is. Most of us have been hearing and reading about the idea of a billion in the context of our wealthiest .01% and the obscene amounts of money they jealously bogart. I’ll bet you never stopped to think about counting this number. Get ready for this, it equals one thousand million, one thousand million!!
No, I am not going to go off on a diatribe about the inequities in our society. I started thinking about these things long ago, seaweed shadows and my close personal friend, time. Before sitting down for this little exercise, I was curious about the projection of Earth’s age and learned she’s around 4.5 billion years old. I have no interest in Big Bang theories or any other guesses as to how this wonderful place came into being, just how long she’s been around.
I started thinking how we revere works of art like Mona Lisa or the Pieta and the extremes we go to to protect them from the ravages of time and us indulgent humans. Ancient places like Stonehenge and Machu Picchu are considered treasures, partially because of their longevity, revered not only for their age, but for their cultural significance.
We humans have always been preoccupied with the moment. I want what I want and I want it now. All of the well earned angst about our climate and its threat to our very existence seems kind of selfish to me. Within the past few months, over one billion animals perished in the fires that devoured Australia. When numbers get too large, they can be numbing, impossible to count on the fingers and toes of our mind.
We can only hear our own voices and earth needs some surrogates, who can speak on her behalf. She’s got no voice and the muted fossils of too long ago are looking on, silent witnesses to our disrespect for all she has been through to arrive at this moment in our own very short history. During the course of her incalculable life span, our planet has seen it all, even getting blasted by huge meteors, one that even precipitated the demise of all the dinosaurs, who ponderously plodded the earth with the same reckless bravado we now strut around with.
Planet earth hosted life even before the green seaweed. She is a work of art without peer, an extravagant living, museum without any walls, ultimately incomprehensible, the work of God. I set aside my comparatively trivial preoccupation with time and have been trying to fathom the unbelievable story of this place. How can we possibly think we are more important or we have some greater purpose than honoring our home?
At some point during this last week, I stumbled across a South African word, ubuntu, which translates to “I am because we are.” I swear, I’ve got no interest in sharing a bitch fest about where we are at, nor am I naively hopeful everything will work out for the best either. There are so many voices out there now, everyone from the megalomaniacal moron with the orange face to the passionate, young woman from Sweden. In the midst of this cacophony of conflicting agendas, I am missing the muted chorus, singing the praises of the billions of years this place has borne witness to all Creation.
I know it sounds crazy, but the story of the green seaweed fossil got me thinking about how big She is and how small I am.
