Webster Brook September 5, 2019

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into the soup again

We can thank the cyanobacteria for this

Being here today along with all evolved life

As I learned today listening to you

Walking along hearing the history of the earth.

Our first mile covered a few billion years

When life in the ocean lived on sulfur 

Until these bacteria emerged to eat carbon dioxide

Fixing nitrogen and excreting oxygen.

Everything follows from that biochemistry 

Leading to algae and later plants 

But all that byproduct oxygen wreaked havoc

Being toxic pollution to most existing life.

And as photosynthesis consumed the carbon dioxide

Causing the opposite of our greenhouse effect today

Our planet cooled into a frozen snowball

Covering the entire ocean under thick ice.

Lucky for us the cyanobacteria survived

And volcanoes spewed more carbon dioxide

And the atmosphere rebalanced to our happy place

Before the anthropocene crisis unfolding today.

So this organism is the scourge blooming in our lakes

Fed by our fertilizer runoff fouling the water with toxins

Undrinkable and unsuitable for swimming or even boating

Taking us back into the primordial soup.

Every crisis is caused by successful adaptation

Exhausting all available resources 

Poisoning the environment with waste

Creating opportunity for anything that can thrive.

the convergence

The transition happens in some way to all of us

Who live past the age of peak hormones 

As our testosterone ebbs and estrogen wanes

Gender converges into human being.

The potential to identify as a man or a woman

Or some androgynous combination of both

Expressing whatever genes we share in common

Allows us to exhibit every possible characteristic.

We are all hybrid mixes to some degree

Whether or not we are open to the ambiguity

What displays innocently in childhood

Returns to ask acceptance in later years.

This awareness of self is a gift of growing older

If we are able to flow with the changes time brings

To celebrate and embrace who we have become

The person who waited all our lives to emerge.

Willowwood September 1, 2019

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