Gradual Descent

I keep returning to a notion about some comprehensive metaphor for what I'll call the repository of humanness – whether passing thoughts, or all the aggregated knowledge, or all of the DNA on earth – being a nighttime landscape dotted with campfires.

I don't know why it is nighttime, or why I envision a landscape, or why the landscape is dotted with fires, but I see this in my mind. My point of view is as if perched in a fire tower. From that perspective, I imagine I see the curvature of the earth, not unlike the sensation of flying on a clear night.

I suppose the metaphor is that we stoke the fires of humanness while we're here, and in return, the fires give us light and warmth.

It's not easy to reconcile this vision with the immediacy of day-to-day living except perhaps by nibbling at it with poetry.

Gradual Descent
Saint Paul, 11 November 2011
We see the curvature of the earth
a moonless midnight dotted with fire
not knowing the origin of warmth
or why the fires disappear at dawn
But we begin our gradual descent
with our tray tables locked
in the upright position

This notion about humanness might have been born from a dream. It has been with me so long, it's difficult to remember the origin.