Happy belated Thanksgiving

From my end of this scenescent world to yours.

Hi from my favorite tea table on Earth—on my uncle’s back deck in Afton, VA:

I’m thinking of what I usually do when I stare at the Blue Ridge: the world these mountains surged into, Himalaya-high, 1 billion years ago.

Everything back then was pristine, profound, gorgeous, and totally unlivable. The world still spun so fast on its axis that its days were only 18 hours long. The few cyanobacteria that had emerged hadn’t produced nearly enough atmospheric oxygen to sustain complex life; a person who traveled back to that time would suffocate in minutes.

This place only became livable by dying to itself. Year after year, day after day, moment by moment by agonizing moment, all up and down the Blue Ridge: cells expired; colonies collapsed; brown leaves piled up; mountains crumbled; losses mounted; the world slowed down. New shoots came up but never lasted. Animals nurtured and loved and hurt and killed and mourned each other. And on and on and on.

Billions and billions of years of the mounting unthinkable: that’s all evolution is, isn’t it? Life finding its way to and through the unthinkable. And after all of it, look, here we are: the most complicated, contradictory, strange, and beautiful creatures that have ever been, risen on a world finally weary and soft enough to hold us. And this landscape! Beautiful beyond description; silent as new snow.

Back in that world of anoxic, titanic perfection, there was never any hope for us. There is now, for now, and only because everything dies.

Anyway, I love you all. See you next week.