Formation of earth—explosion, fire, water to land, hot core, first ferns, beginning of eyes, of seeing, hearing, knowing—to humanoids arriving in the last sliver of a 10-foot-long timeline or last millisecond of since forever. Yet, this truth never convinces us how wispy we are. After all, we tickled out the timelines. We are the culmination, where the timeline always intended to go. We are creatures that know we know.

Years ago in Davos, Switzerland I heard a woman crow that her astrophysicist husband had done the math and it is impossible that advanced life exists anywhere else in the cosmos. Please, if you’re going to be stupid, do it on your own merit, don’t borrow from someone else. 

But we are all delusional. We may read timelines but know nothing of what was before. We may split atoms, chart elements, discover there are no smudges, only separate units going infinitely into minutia and infinity. We may study weak and strong forces, gravity, magnetism, inertia, and pheromones, but we only learn what they do, not why they do it. 

  It’s easy to believe something really really weird is real, but hard to think how it could be.–7-year-old girl

We resist the bald truth that there seems to be no reason for us, that we may exist only because we can and the value of our lives is a construct of evolution that we should be happy and reproduce–or seek happiness and therefore reproduce. We resist it by creating myths that are not nearly so interesting.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver 

The chill is still on for this spring. I sit inside by a fire with my dog beside me. I pet him behind his ears as we stare at flames as humans and gentler wolves have always done. Fire has been fire since the beginning of the timeline—atoms vibrate off each other faster and faster, faster than local gossip, faster than lust, touching our skin, our hopes, our tomorrows, taming and recharging us. 

There is nothing of his ancestors in my dog that I can see, his killer instinct limited to barking over his weight class and slamming himself against the door when men in uniform deliver packages or other dogs intrude on his territory. He is fed from cans supplemented by home-cooked basmati rice with ground chicken or turkey. He can carry a grudge but only for a little time. He is getting older and sometimes wobbles. I worry. A lot.

  A dog is one of the few things in life that is as it seems.—Mark J. Asher

You and I may never see hard evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, but we know that whatever created light and dogs isn’t going to stop with us. Whatever expands, creates, and melds substance with wave and intent is not going to stop now. 

If we demolish earth as a home for complex organisms, the universe will not care. We are a millisecond, a sliver. We will be hopped over for millennia until another life form emerges, new creatures that believe they know what they know. Perhaps they actually will, perhaps they will be kinder than we have been. 

God, I think, is what is alive in us. God is life—balance, rhythm, stop and start, nectar for bees, seeds for birds, buds for blooms. She is nesting, reproduction, line and form against line and form. She is what is physical and what is beyond physical, the transference from fire to air to face. She is movement, orbs, attraction, spinning atoms, laughter at strange times out of nowhere. 

Evolution will continue if we knock ourselves out of the running. Life does not need humans.

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.—The Lorax

We are a creative, beguiling, and misguided millisecond. If we wish for more than that, we can no longer be stupid on our own or borrowed from others.