ASK ALLEN WHEELIS: WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?
We are the carriers of Earth’s Spirit. We did not create Spirit, nor can we possess or define it. But we are its bearers. Spirit rises, matter falls. Spirit reaches like a flame, a leap of a dancer. Spirit is a traveler, passing now through the human realm. We inch it forward with each of the heart. We falter; pass it on to our children. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, stranger, more complex.
Spirit leaps aside from matter which tugs forever to pull it down, to make it still. Minute creatures writhe in warm oceans. They come together, touch, something passes. Viruses become bacteria, become algae, become ferns. Thrust of Spirit cracks stone, drives up Douglas fir. Amoebas reach out soft blunt arms in ceaseless motion to find the world, to know it better, questioning further.
Viewed closely, the path of Spirit seem to meander, is a glisten of a snail’s way in the night forest. But from a height, minor turnings merge into steadfastness of course. Humans have reached a ledge from which we can look back. For thousands of years the view is clear. The horizon is millions of years behind us. Beyond the vagrant turnings of our last march stretches a shining path.
ASK NIKOS KASANRTZAKIS: How shall we confront life and death, virtue and fear? All our race takes refuge in us, asks questions and lies waiting in agony. In this lightning moment when we walk the Earth, our first duty is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of our beings. Our dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. We sit under their shade. We are nourished by their flesh. We inhale their breathing. They have become our ideas and passions. Myriad hands hold our hands and direct them. When we sleep, tombs open in the memory till our skulls brim with ghosts. We must gather our strength and listen: the who heart of humanity is a single outcry.
This is the moment of greatest crisis. As soon we are born, you and I, a new possibility was born with us. We have a great responsibility. We do not govern our own small, insignificant existence. We are the throw of dices on which, for the moment, the entire fate of our race is gambled.