An Ode To The Earth

An excerpt from my yet to be released book: “Border, Bandits, And Baby Wipes: The 10,000 Crooked Miles Between Two Points.”

I love the Earth and the idea of the Earth.

I love the unpredictability of it, that no matter how well we’re able to anticipate the seasons, the crops, and the tides, we can do very little to predict what the next year, month, or day of our lives will reveal.

I love the enormity of it. There’s a sensation I get when I stand on an ocean’s shore gazing out into the blue forever and think: This is where a continent ends. Right here. I’m standing at the collision of two worlds — a collision whose existence we know intimately via maps we’ve traced with our fingers or globes we’ve spun. Land is only land because there is no sea, and it’s here that my feet and ankles become part of their respective realms depending on the ebb and flow of the tides. For a few seconds I am a tenant of a continent whose entire rocky story lies behind me, and in the next moment I am an occupant of the sea, at the mercy of the orchestra of currents playing their melody before me. The edge of two worlds, worlds that make up the entire surface of the moist mud ball we call Earth, ceding and gaining on each other in equal chunks, giving us the zero sum boundary of a coastline. Isn’t that amazing?

I love the history of it; how the Earth displays the vast expanse of geologic time she’s been through by giving us mountains, rivers, valleys, canyons, glaciers, lakes, and fossils.

I love the determination of it; how lives of all shapes and sizes clash and cohabit in billions of combinations and ecosystems, having arisen against inconceivable odds from one microscopic smudge that for a moment was the only living thing that ever existed. When this invisible blot looked at all the infinite non-existence around it, it could have easily folded and said, “To hell with this nonsense,” but instead said, “Nah. Not yet. In fact, I’m gonna cut myself in half so I have someone to share my story with.”

I love the inevitability of time and its relentless march forward, with or without me.

I love that for this ephemeral pulse, this sliver of chronological happenstance before my expiration date, I can look around and think, “I’m alive. Holy shit. I’m alive.”

(Borders, Bandits and Baby Wipes is going out to agents and publishers in mid May.)