Inevitable

We’ve lived this life.
The indigenous and the ancestors warn us,
Not because of future danger,
But out of past regret.

We know where this ends,
Not because a scientist has done the math,
But because war is not new.
Hubris is not new.
And, when vapid men possess themselves with the two--
As they sometimes do--
The world as we know it
Can cease to exist.

But we don’t cease.
Some of us--a very few, mostly children--
Survive,
And the storytellers among us
Rise up to craft our creation--
A creation meant to preserve and last.
The children learn young,
And teach their children,
And so on,
And so forth,
Until something older than we and the world
Infects a heart,
A mind,
And the infection--greed, anger, distrust, despair--spreads.

And, instead of memories of our last demise,
We begin to create delusions that we are the source of creation--
That we have an unmatched and unstoppable power.
We forget that empires, like all things,
Fall,
And everything,
Todo,
Cambia.

Perhaps it is inevitable.
Maybe there is no avoiding the end of the world
As we know it.
If that is so,
We must begin writing our creation story now.
We must teach our children now,
So that those of us who survive
Can survive well.

I will teach my children
That we all begin with LOVE--
An act
That gives way to a force
And a story.

The act--kindness, trust, closeness
Enough for sperm and egg to mingle and meet
Sometimes a lifetime,
Sometimes a split second,
Enough for one person to give to another,
And for the other to want to do the same
For another;
And another.

Creating a force,
A spirit of gift giving.
And what is a gift?
A thing freely given without compensation
Even when compensation is just.
Gift begats gift
Until the spirits of joy and laughter join in;
Until the intangible has real life affect;
Until we are compelled to record its wonder,

And boy
do we record the wonder:
In song, word, film, art.
We create new mediums just to capture
Our beginning.
We write a new story any way we can,
Then we rewrite it
Over and over again.

We rewrite to adjust for change
In language--
Time--
Circumstance.
We rewrite to remember
To join the force again--
Literally REnew our MEMBERship.
We rewrite to reject that old enemy of good
And remember that we are born of love.
An act--
A force--
A story we will tell the survivors
In the hopes of staving off
The inevitable end.

And, in doing so,
We lay the foundation
For the inevitable rebirth.
We become inevitable.