PRELUDE

Let us imagine for a moment that we are human beings. Let us imagine that within these drifting galaxies, this swirl of random energy, we have been given this moment of light to pass into a realm of our own creation. Let us imagine that we are here on this mountainside beneath these great redwoods, looking down on the seashore and out onto the breathing sea. Let us say that we spot a lone Gray Whale breaching the surface to breathe and spout its plume of mist, and that a flock of pelicans drifting in v-formation low near the sea, turn in unconscious unison to avoid the whale’s mist, and that the cool red sun in the western sky has just touched the sea to sink now beyond our sight behind the long horizon.

Let us call this: a moment in time.

To find one’s self alive in this new moment is a marvelous thing! The earth, reaching out in all directions, thriving with living things of all manner, plants, trees, birds, insects, furry animals trotting on padded feet or hooves along worn paths, hawks circling high above, watching for life, the sky spread thin over the bright sea as it rises and falls, too grand to fathom. Life! And here, within this flourishing illusion one sits and breathes, listens and sees. A marvelous thing!

In our collective imagination we have all conspired to construct the life of Man, his great societies, his aspirations and discoveries, his wars and slaughters, his hunger, his joy, his suffering. We have conjured up a measurement called Time and the illusion of future and past, beginnings and endings, concepts of good and evil. And from all of this conjuring we have come to believe that lives have been lived, some positive and helpful, others destructive and frightful, most a little of both. And we have learned to record these lives and these times and compile them into what we call the histories, the story of Man.

This could be one of those stories.