Beneath the Cottonwood 1
~thebogboys
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My friend and I have been sort of illegally camping out at a small
patch of DNR hunting land, a place about equidistant between our
cities. The soil is dark and sandy, speaking to the rich
biodiversity of flora, the grandeur of the giant trees overhead,
the sweet calls of mallards, marsh wrens, towhees, and all of the
variety of herbaceous plants underfeet. The soil is glacial till,
the remains of many tens of thousands of years of powerful erosion
from the last glacial maximum, where my home would have been
covered by a mile of ice. These cold mountains dragged untold
millions of tons of volcanic and quartziferous rock from the
Canadian shield south to the Midwest, flattening out the terrain as
it went, gradually melting and releasing these deposits wherever
they traveled.

As I walk through this forest, I see that nothing remains of the
titans that once crushed this land but the soft soil. Even such
behemoths as they were meant to eventually fade away and concede to
the gentle and ever-persistent pressures of Time, and how will this
planet bear the scars of the titan of human civilization in a
million years? Will any of our concrete foundations, steel towers
and great hydroelectric dams remain, or will it all be reduced to
the same type of soil that I am merely squishing beneath my boots?

Entertaining such thoughts is akin to entertaining one's own
annihilation. The great mystery of death will intrigue and haunt me
for the rest of my days, that I am sure. I had shed the lovely
superstitions of faith in my younger years, and the price I pay is
that I must wrestle with the great Anxiety written about by
Kierkegaard, and Camus, and Becker. I have found that the only
place that I can engage with the Anxiety in a sober, healthy way is
when I am in nature. It is so easy to recognize the smallness of
everything, the absurdity in my fears. Just as I trample a dead
blackberry cane from last year, so too will my body be broken up
and used in due time. There is no morality to this, no great
arbiter that I must clench my fists and scream to in dissent, all
of existence is just a process of coming into or leaving. I am
grateful that for right now I get to enjoy the feeling of coming
into existence. It has been said that humanity is the "universe
looking at itself", and while I do not know if I would wish to be
so conceited as to believe that humans are such an apex in the
history of the universe, at the very least I can appreciate the
phrase from another perspective: the purpose of life IS to see. We
may not be "put" here for any particular purpose, but such purpose
can be acquired by putting oneself in the back seat and letting the
raw input of the senses become our narrator.

=> https://midnight.pub/posts/2362 Part 2
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> evan@thebogboys.space