The 2012 Hetrick Family reunion was all but over. Elders, adults, youth, and children all containing the same genes were packing up and heading out. Just three remained seated on folding chairs in the driveway of the old homestead farmhouse. As westerners, were their bodies simply still in a different time zone and thus were not yet ready to call it a day? Not exactly: turns out we were sitting there waiting for the appearance of fire flies, the one thing each of us misses most about living in the west.
But it was summer after all, and the dusk did not descend until somewhat later. By then Milt and I were tromping around in the family cemetery after placing a fistful of wildflowers on his parents’ headstone. A cornfield framed the resting place of ancestors who had moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania in search of good farmland. Like the Hetricks, my ancestors too had left Germany after hundreds of years of religious warfare had devastated the landscape; they too had been welcomed to settle in Penn’s religiously tolerant colony. But by the time they arrived, much of the best land was already taken; so they moved on to colonize the newly seized British area of southeastern Canada.
In both cases, our forebears were looking for farmable land that would sustain their new lives and ensure the well being of their descendents.
Now the corn in the field beyond is struggling against the encroaching drought that has already claimed the crops we drove past in Indiana and Illinois, for another human folly is upon us. Climate change threatens the very foundation upon which our ancestors built their hopes and dreams for us as future generations.
Lightning bugs blink on and off all across the cemetery. The flying specks of fire transport my imagination backwards…through my human, animal, vegetable, and mineral ancestry on this planet, then even further across cosmic time to that first great burst of light ‘in the beginning’ as it became bosons. As Milt describes it:
Light flaring forth
13.7 billion years ago ….
Expanding…
Cooling…
Light (Energy) transforming into Matter…
Matter transforming back into light…
E = mc2…
Emergence of things like Strings,
Expanding…
Cooling…
Allowing the Emergence of Complexity…
Quarks, and Anti-Quarks,
X-Bosons and Anti -X-Bosons…
the light / elemental particle soup…
This is the same light that today re-emerges as consciousness. Humans can become ‘enlightened’ before it is too late for the planet to survive. For now, the cemetery comes alive with the sparks of lightning bugs as if they were messengers from the ancestors. We have much to answer for.
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