See the Earth unearthly. Earth without oceans. Without mountains, valleys, chasms. Earth without rivers, caves, deserts. Earth without sky. Earth without Moon. Earth without earth. Earth without you.

Unearthly.

Now Earth is new, just expelled from a star that had grown too great with its own creativity. Earth is whirling in space, heaving, seething, pulsing - a pinpoint of molten matter 8,000 miles thick.

The bowels of Earth and the surface of Earth are the same: an elemental commotion so hot that every atom seems ready for breakdown. Or build-up. Earth is swaddled in a blanket of agitated gases and sublime radiation, thousands of miles deep. Action and reaction. Electron and proton. Atom on atom. Nucleus on nucleus. Heavy on light. Light on heavy. All on all.

Here is a sphere of iron and gold and silver. Of hydrogen and oxygen and carbon. Of copper and tin and lead. Of sodium, radium and uranium. Of chlorine, neon, nitrogen. Of mercury. Of sulfur. Of silicon. Of iodine. Of 92 elements compacted into a ball. And it's excited. Everything is in a flux. Everything bounds and rebounds. Everything changes. Currents of iron rush from the center to the surface, from the surface to the center. Back and forth. Back and forth. Aluminum, tungsten, magnesium, calcium, silicon bubble and dance, spurt in jets; sink, rise; sink, rise. Action and reaction. All on all.

Thus, a gigantic cauldron, Earth begins its voyage around the Sun, the first of some four billion six hundred million still to come.

For millions and millions and millions of years, Earth revolves and rotates, cooling, always cooling. And as it cools, it becomes more complex. It keeps changing. The heaviest matter condenses into a core, the lightest floats like a scum. Elements combine, make minerals, make liquid rock - make something utterly unmade before. Its dense envelope of gas and radiation thins. In time, Earth is cool enough for water to form without being instantly vaporized by the burning surface. And it rains. It rains for a billion years. Electrical and magnetic storms sweep from pole to pole, then sweep back again. The equator is an unimpeded highway for tornadoes that roll straight around the globe. Again. And again. And again. And again.

And a light crust forms. And primitive seas form. And the crust cracks from the weight of water. And water rushes to the interior, and is explosively ejected, and rushes in, and is ejected, and rushes in, and is ejected. The crust contracts, expands, deforms; some crust sinks deep towards the center of Earth; some rises high above the waters and land appears: the first continent from which all subsequent continents will be derived. And Earth begins to settle down. But not completely. Earthquakes and massive volcanic eruptions shake Earth daily if not hourly. Water encounters everything, every old element, every new mineral. A little bit of everything - and a great deal of a few things - go into solution. And now the seas are a rich chemical soup such as no star could ever create, even though all this has come from a star. And so the foundation of life is laid. All the essentials are there, nothing is missing. And there is no eye to see it, no ear to hear it. It is as if nothing were happening at all. Yet history has already begun, is already very old.

	Within the Earth already lie the rise and fall of countless species, the birth and death of hundreds of civilizations. Sharks are there, ready to swim; the dinosaurs are there, ready to rage; the gibbons, ready to gibber; wolves, ready to howl. The ruins of Ninevah, Troy, Petra, Carthage, Copan and Angkor Wat are already there. The Egyptians with their masks of gold, the Jews with their sacred tablets, the Chinese with their porcelain bowls, the Indians with their thoughts of Krishna, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Armenians and the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, the Incas and the Aztecs - they are all already within the Earth. And Buddha is within it. And Saint Francis. And Caesar. And Shakespeare. And Newton. The Bible is within it. The Koran. The Upanishads. Painting is within it. Music is within it. Speech is within it. And sex. Earth is waiting, waiting for all to emerge.

Earth waits for the octopus and the tiger. Earth waits for the mushroom and the orchid. Earth waits for the mammoth and the ape. Earth waits for the pyramids and the Great wall of China. Earth waits for harvests and festivals, for famines and wars. Earth waits for love and fear, for courage and cowardice, for hope and despair. Earth waits for you. For just as Earth is the child of a star, you are the child of the Earth, and no less descended from a star. Earth waits for its star-child...to come and give it the name of Earth.

You and Earth and history are one. You do not belong to a race or nation, to a time or doctrine. You belong to Earth. Through you - through Humankind - Earth has sought and found a mouth to speak with, eyes to see with, hands to work with. Through you, Earth discovers itself and reveals itself to itself and to the rest of the universe. Early man - unblinded by science and institutional religion, undeafened by economic and political theory - seemed to know this. Early man was not alienated from the Earth. For him, every tree and stone, every river and mountain possessed a spirit that was inextricably entangled with Earth. Kings felt and understood their descent from the Sun. Their people felt it too. And if they could not express it in cold equations as a fact of physics, believing in it as a divine truth, that does not make them more naive or less sensible than anyone alive today. What they had, what we have lost, is a sense of wonder, a sense of union with every living and non-living entity on Earth and in the universe.

Humankind has come a long way since it first appeared as a species. It has a long way to go. Perhaps we will go. Perhaps we are a stepping stone to a higher species with powers of consciousness over mind and matter that are impossible to imagine right now. For, surely, Earth is still waiting, waiting for more to emerge. Earth is not finished. Earth has all the time in the world.

Everything about Earth is a mystery. Geologists do not know the structure of the core. Biologists do not know why or how life began. Physicists cannot explain gravitation or magnetism. Psychologists are defeated by telepathy. Historians and modern architects cannot even agree about how the Pyramids were built. It is as if we have forgotten our origins, like Easter Island figures staring sightless and forever toward an unknown shore. But how can this be so?

Since every single thing on Earth derives from the same source, every single thing must carry the memory of that source. Like some text in a lost language, the history of Earth - of the universe - must be written in the mind of everyone, but inscrutable, indecipherable. For us, then, is the task of recovering, of finding what has been found and lost a hundred times before.

We must return to the source of our being and drink from it, or we will perish, which (clearly) Earth will not permit. Earth will not allow four and a half billion years of creativity to be annihilated by its principal species in a few hundred years. Earth has shown itself to be too flexible, too productive, too loving for that. Earth is not a suicide trip around the Sun. It has much to do, much more to do. And so have we.

To find out where we are going, we must first find out where we came form. Music and poetry help us remember, as they always have, for they are basic, uncorrupted and incorruptible. They are the original magic out of which religions were formed, and though those religions may be extinct (even if still practiced), the magic of music and poetry is not extinct. It lives in every one of us. The contemplation of art helps us remember. Meditation helps us remember. Communal action helps us remember. Love helps us remember.

Look at Earth. See its oceans and mountains and valleys and chasms. See its rivers and plains. See its webs and spiders, its foxes and grapes, its vultures and flamingos. They are all sacred. See its sky and Moon. And see for yourself. You have been alive since the moment of Earth's creation. And you will remain alive as long as Earth continues its daily round of light and dark, and yearly round of miraculous seasons.

Life spins its own meaning and its own purpose. Life is its own religion, and we are all highpriests. Neither life nor Earth nor Humankind needs a saviour or a received religion to impose form and direction. The direction and the form are there. We must search for them. And just by trying, just by meditating, just by contemplating, just by submitting to love and love's potent alchemy, direction and form will find us. They will find us where we have always been - with our feet planted firmly in Earth and our heads pointing toward the Sun.

You and Earth and history are one.

(cave painting) (detail of "Vitruvian Man" - Leonardo) (from an electrical schematic by Nikola Tesla) (detail of "Twittering Machine" - Paul Klee)