Human Migration

Mark Nepo — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:58:38 +0000

They say we began before we could
speak, that whether running from some
woolly mammoth or squinting to see into
the sun, we stood erect and began to search.
They say this was a million years ago. Some-
where in Africa, as the long wind with a
thousand scents swept through the high
grass. What they don’t say is that it’s all
been one nameless soul using many lives
in one endless search. It’s been forty thou-
sand generations, skin upon skin carrying
the one soul as far as each could. Following
the call of animals into the interior. Then
drawn into the desert by sand and wind. Then
one of us believed it was north, another west,
another east. And so we split and each was less
for giving up that Oneness. And so we died and
were born; thinking we were beginning our own
search for gold, for love, for meaning, for silence.
But this is how the one soul keeps us going, by
imbuing each of its skins with a guise of special-
ness along the way. So Europe and Asia and
Australia were settled. Like ant hills built
around a hope for buried sugar. And the one
soul kept us moving. By now the movement
alone gave it peace. And closer to our own
time, only forty generations back, the quiet
ones began a slow journey from Japan across
the Bering Straits and down North America.
At each clearing some settled while the restless
kept on. Down the Pacific to South America
where the child of a child met the child of
a child who’d come the other way from
Europe through the New World down the
Atlantic to this small town along the coast
of Chile. And sensing something ancient
and unfinished in each other, they married
and had a child who, once old enough to
walk, stared into the sun and began
to search.

Three Intentions » Oneness

Human Migration