Evolution

"It will be all of us, and we will farm, and it will be what we do," they pledged, some plunging hands gleefully into soil, others tentatively digging a toe into long-unturned earth.  They turned their backs on a system that had uprooted them from family and community, and turned their faces to the sun, and all felt the same rays.

But before that, they had declared themselves individuals, each claiming his own role or defining her own title, compartmentalizing and specializing themselves, stretching the fragile connections between themselves and the earth until they snapped.

And before that, they had fought against each other along lines drawn by color or topography, conquering and claiming manifest destiny over lands and cultures, declaring the end of evolution.

Even before that, they had flocked from the fertile valleys to build cities on hills, glistening with the jewels extracted from the abandoned countryside, as they shifted their devotion from the earth to its men.

But before it all... "It will be us, and we will farm, and it will be what we do..." was the one truth that never needed to be spoken, because it was what had first made them human. 

LL 3/8/09