seeding terror, seeping hope
It wasn’t until the droplet made gentle contact that I became conscious of of my lot. Where it was timid, I sprang forth vibrating with temerity. Conditions, however, held me fast.
There were many things I would come to discover about my predicament–encased in sediment, a prisoner in that very medium that should have sustained me, starving for light, for sounds that did not reverberate to reach me muffled, distorted. Was I, likewise, distorted? I refused this outright.
But first–oh, the firstness of that first–there was only a singular feeling of being. And then, of being not singular. Though we could not communicate but for our cosmically catalytic touch, I nevertheless thanked the droplet for its decisive role in my awakening.
Thus situated, how, you may wonder, was I to fulfill my destiny? In time. Time immemorial.
I toiled long after that first contact. Weeks, years, decades…it matters not. I survived to meet you here, Other, did I not? How move you so freely? What invisible force binds you to your destiny? Or do you wander, ever fluid, unbecoming and unresolved.
In darkness totalizing, waiting for a droplet here, an infusion of nutrients there, reaching toward I knew not what, extending tendrils of myself whenever possible, only to feel them whither, defeated… Still I held fast–what else was I to do but wait? Wait and fear. Fear that I would again fall into the ignorance of nonexistence.
The hard-packed void would not last, of course, but it is impossible to remember when I first knew that to be so. Why always the insistence upon when? Is not the What more intriguing?
Feeling–knowing–my destiny was indeed before me, had I but the patience. That is the What worth knowing, worth fighting for with ever fibre of my not-yet-fibrous being. If the conditions would become, would hold, would cooperate, would but meet…together we could bind and flourish into a world made marvelous.
Made real despite that which sought to trap, to deny incontestable destiny.
I am made miracle marvelous, come forth from sweat and stone, squeezed to light brought with will and chance and hope.
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Contemporary Contempt 
I think this is a wonderful idea. As I write this, I am looking at the objects on my desk in a very different light–and that’s only partly because I just moved my lamp a little bit. Reminds me of a passage in the revisionist Western, “Little Big Man”:
Jack Crabb: Do you hate them? Do you hate the White man now?
Old Lodge Skins: Do you see this fine thing? Do you admire the humanity of it? Because the human beings, my son, they believe everything is alive. Not only man and animals, but also water, earth, stone, and also the things from them like that hair. The man from whom this hair came, he’s bald on the other side, because I now own his scalp! That is the way things are. But the white man, they believe everything is dead. Stone, earth, animals. And people! Even their own people! If things keep trying to live, white man will rub them out. That is the difference.
I’m going to see if I can learn to listen more carefully to the objects around me.
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