The Leaves On A Tree

These days it is as though the world has changed its shape around us. There was a time that seems so long ago now, when it seemed almost as if the world had been made to fit around us.

Nowadays we are not so sure.

Although there are some who like to see themselves, or – more often – the rest of us, as some parasites, some harmful disease on the surface of the Earth, as some abhorrent freak on nature that will destroy the planet it feeds off.

In one sense though every thing is a freak of nature, for that is how nature survives, how living things continue is through natural selection.

Human beings are not – as religions try to fool us into believing – something set apart from nature. We are as natural as the leaves on a tree or that fish glinting silver in the shadowed pool. We can no more step outside nature than we can step outside space and time.

With earthquakes, volcanoes, storms and floods nature can show that we are just as puny as ants washed away in a downpour. Our cities may look mighty and twinkle brightly when seen from space, but to the rest of nature they matter as much as do termite mounds.

We are not here as some mysterious whim of some god, a toy for him to idle away his endless hours, we have grown from the nature of this world and we will continue to be defined by it, even as our powers to redefine it in our own way grow from our understanding of it. This world is all our futures as well as all of our pasts.