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The Long Walk



It goes something like this, I think:
being alive is a wondrous and mysterious thing!

We are, today, awaiting the news
that we shall be grandparents again.
It will be Elliza and Daniel's second child:
a couple of years ago, Elliot was born,
and she has been a wonder since.

And . . . 

 and this is not at all a sad thought
but as full of wonder as first coming to life,
in a few day I shall be eighty-six.
I have no premonitions,
but no pretensions, either:
I do not expect to live forever.
I am not that much in love with artificial joints!

Not so long ago in human history--
that part of our past that we can recall
(there is so much that came even earlier)--
people tried to explain the difference
between being just something, and being alive.

"Breath!", they said.  "Living things breathe!"

And there we have something like the notion of soul.
Take breath away, or lose breath, and life is gone:
only a breathless body remains.

That is no explanation at all, but it is clumsily sufficient
to explain that the active becomes inert:  the breath is gone.
It went somewhere.  The soul . . . what is that, anyway?
Something?  A thing?  An activity.  Yes, they said,
the soul has left the body.  People even tried to weigh it.
That didn't work, either.  Body and soul.

That is useable nonsense.
It is a way to admit we do not know much.
It is also a way to say that being alive is grand,
for so long as it works; for as long as the sea rolls.

Life isn't something in us
so much as it is something we are in.

I don't know whether life is inevitable.
It does seem to be the case that it springs up early;
on earth, almost as early as conditions allowed.
Elsewhere?  Surely in other places, too!

Just for fun, Mari and I had DNA tests done,
and the thumping big result of it is that
we are what life does.  Life is very old on earth,
and human life is newer, but old, still,
and that the twisted strands of DNA in us
tell a long story about how all of us
are the children of people who walked out of Africa,
like rolling generations of life.

And today probably, in Portland,
a new girl or boy will come breathing into the world
whose ancestors have walked all over the world
huffing and puffing and falling in love with each other.

Warms the soul, doesn't it?

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