The Carolinian Trail

September 12, 2000

First published on the now-defunct website, Themestream, as an essay, "Song of evolution."

The bay around our dock is still, but wind stirs pine trees on a rocky point across the lake. We hear this distant gust like the voice of God in beauty across the cosmos. The Creator speaks to us personally but not always intimately, and we sometimes fail to notice. The voice is transparent to us, not always obvious; now clear, now far.

This morning's rain clouds have finally given way enough for my children and I to spend some peaceful time on the dock.

Spirit: you cleanse me. I rest in the blessedness of purified sunlight, washed by rising morning vapours from this shining face. The lake's countenance bears no grimace or irony. Its expression is all true and serene. Numinous are the subconscious backwaters of its bays, curled like wisdom beneath the spreading shadows of cedar and yellow birch. Minnows school and leap under even ripples, embraced in silence. Mergansers come to feed on the minnows. Sheltered water rooms play out the cycle of life.

Along the shaded rim, silver ripples sing against the mingling interface of maple mould. Foliar lives are miniscule here: tresses of liverwort and fern, moss and sundew. If I could turn my soul tiny as a water worm I'd shelter myself along this aqueous fringe, on the margin of destiny, where walking life first emerged from silence.

It climbed blinking into sunlight. What mysteries did these primordial eyes see on the marches of the ocean? Transcending its glaucous boundaries, what marvels did they behold in the virgin kingdom, not yet inseminated by seed or tongue or claw?

We–-in the flesh of our progenitors–-brought our own marvels, like gifts of the bridegroom. Our lives arrayed resplendent in shining scale, we stirred motion across the landscape and sang in space above the seas. A line of kings and master warriors evolved, raging as their green cousins never could. Violent was their endowment to the world. This was a new mystery of song. Hungry tongues wove a new strain of creation across the fabric of chlorophyll.

This was our strange answer to chaos.