Improvisation from Spring

Spring is just spreading through the air as winter’s grip is slowly seeping away from the land. I sit here in my apartment, music unwinds itself through the atmosphere as I peer out the window, lost in the continuous processes of the earth, the source and giver of life for which we are forever tied.

How futile our flight from the land is! As we extol it with our mouths, we simultaneously lay it low with the lemmings’ rush toward progress. What a mad, dumb beast we are–and what other creature in this world has ever known insanity or the slaughter that has defined humanity’s short reign on this small speck of space that has been forever called God’s crown jewel? The pomposity of the higher order of ape. We are the spaceorangutanutang–the grunting simian of space stations and shuttles. 2001 come and gone, the weapon of bone never far out of reach.

The twenty first century–what promise it held in those decades leading up to it. A world of peace and hope lay before us, a brotherhood and sisterhood of understand. All those dreams wiped away in the blazes of that cruel September day, the smoke from the towers blinding millions to the causes of their implosion.

A brotherhood of man! How ridiculous those words seem now that we’ve entered the age of nationalism unleashed once again! Athens and Sparta hot on the boot heels of progress. The new dark ages spread against the sky in a curtain of burning oil. The Empires of old rumble over the land once more.

And so, I sit here, lost in the earth’s nurturing womb as the surface currents play themselves out over the face of the sea, while truth lurks below in the depths, down where the jellyfish dance free. We hold the lion and eagle up as kings of the animal kingdom, but they are as much slaves as the most well paid CEOs. The jellyfish–now there is a prince among animals! It has no need to come screeching out of the sky or roaring out of the bush to rip a rodent or gazelle apart for a meal–it survives simply and contentedly just wobbling through the sea. The scientist tells us that the jellyfish is a lower form of life, but the scientist is wrong. Evolution has equipped the jellyfish to get by on less, and so it has no use for spending so much of its life chasing after meals. It simply exists, contented to be carried by the currents of the sea where it will. I declare the jellyfish as a new symbol for wisdom and contentment–humanity has followed the lionized path long enough.

The mechanized apes lurch about, measuring success by the length of cars as the ape technology has advanced from the skull-crushing femur to mass destruction at the push of a button (the wonders of convenience!) as the clouds float by overhead and the rivers empty into the sea, as we float through the vastness of space, a petri dish worth of wonder, as I breath in the first stirrings of spring and am content as the music plays on.