Lives passed - stories told
We have gazed up beyond sixty miles of blue sky into the darkness of night to fathom the furthest reaches of the universe over twelve billion years old.
We have scratched at the surface of the sixty mile skin of life, rock and rubbish, and found it’s floating on a red hot core over four billion years old, still slowly oozing through, cracking, wrinkling and pushing it all out of place as it goes.
We have marvelled at the blue and white rain that turns deserts green to feed our hungry mouths.
Now we will marvel at the myths and legends and stories that those who touched our path today have made to feed our minds and souls.
Passing it on
As we each make our way in the world, we look back on the people we met in our lives and the stories they told in our youth of their youth and the people they met and places they knew in their time. I remember relaying proverbs, rhymes or songs that I had heard, connecting back across generations through a twisted tangle of shared lives long past, to far distant times.
Stories infect us like viruses that we can’t help sharing, mutating inside us to change with the times, so keeping them compelling to other minds.
Hunting clues
We have always left our animal traces or waste behind by chance preserved from distant times, but for some time now we have been more conscious about what we leave behind. For hundreds of thousands of years fleeing harsh winter ice or baking sun, we have roamed the world, hunting and lately gathering to eat around fires in caves. We started finding stones to use as tools, bashing them into shapes to kill or carve a better meal or chop more wood to cook and keep us warm. As well as the tale telling tools and bones left behind, just a few pointless or deliberately beautiful pictures have survived from a few far flung corners of the world. Earth or charcoal rubbed deliberately on the wall of cool dark caves unseen for tens of thousands of years, to capture recognisable images of animals that were no doubt feared or revered at the time.
counting beans
For the last eight thousand years the world has been a little more temperate and the climate a little more reliable and we settled down by rivers that flowed constant enough to water and feed us. We tended plants and domesticated animals to support a predicatable harvest at home, we stopped commuting and always travelling light following the call of the migrating wild and settled down and started to build for a longer term future. Before long, we got organised and specialised enough to turn our colective know-how into a surplus to spare and share.
Once we started trading the surplus on we had to keep count of who owed what to whom and an undisputed record to share the rewards fairly at harvest time or when the boat came in. Over thousands years of trading the scratchings on clay accounting tokens denoting the stuff we owned or owed gradually evolved to represent more and more things.
These accounting pictures of things became too numerous to remember and pictures hard to invent for invisible thoughts and feelings. Until someone started using them to represent just the few dozen recognisable sounds of speech. Then, suddenly anything you could already think or say could be written down as easy as ABC.
Stories for centuries long carried from ear to ear in the fields and from parents to children by word of mouth as nursery rhymes and fireside songs started etching their way onto tablets of clay and stone.