Beneath the Cottonwood 1

~thebogboys

My friend and I have been sort of illegally camping out at a small patch of DNR hunting land, a place about equidistant between our cities. The soil is dark and sandy, speaking to the rich biodiversity of flora, the grandeur of the giant trees overhead, the sweet calls of mallards, marsh wrens, towhees, and all of the variety of herbaceous plants underfeet. The soil is glacial till, the remains of many tens of thousands of years of powerful erosion from the last glacial maximum, where my home would have been covered by a mile of ice. These cold mountains dragged untold millions of tons of volcanic and quartziferous rock from the Canadian shield south to the Midwest, flattening out the terrain as it went, gradually melting and releasing these deposits wherever they traveled.

As I walk through this forest, I see that nothing remains of the titans that once crushed this land but the soft soil. Even such behemoths as they were meant to eventually fade away and concede to the gentle and ever-persistent pressures of Time, and how will this planet bear the scars of the titan of human civilization in a million years? Will any of our concrete foundations, steel towers and great hydroelectric dams remain, or will it all be reduced to the same type of soil that I am merely squishing beneath my boots?

Entertaining such thoughts is akin to entertaining one's own annihilation. The great mystery of death will intrigue and haunt me for the rest of my days, that I am sure. I had shed the lovely superstitions of faith in my younger years, and the price I pay is that I must wrestle with the great Anxiety written about by Kierkegaard, and Camus, and Becker. I have found that the only place that I can engage with the Anxiety in a sober, healthy way is when I am in nature. It is so easy to recognize the smallness of everything, the absurdity in my fears. Just as I trample a dead blackberry cane from last year, so too will my body be broken up and used in due time. There is no morality to this, no great arbiter that I must clench my fists and scream to in dissent, all of existence is just a process of coming into or leaving. I am grateful that for right now I get to enjoy the feeling of coming into existence. It has been said that humanity is the "universe looking at itself", and while I do not know if I would wish to be so conceited as to believe that humans are such an apex in the history of the universe, at the very least I can appreciate the phrase from another perspective: the purpose of life IS to see. We may not be "put" here for any particular purpose, but such purpose can be acquired by putting oneself in the back seat and letting the raw input of the senses become our narrator.

-=-.o._.o.-=-‾-=-.o._.o.-=-

evan@thebogboys.space