alive

Empires, nations, wars, and alliances come and go. They each rise up in their season, and each eventually reveals an intolerable untruth, a rotten core, or a fatal weakness and passes away, some sooner, some later.

But life persists. When the "Reich to last a thousand years" petered out after only a dozen, life remained on the ground, damaged, but still vigorously breathing in and breathing out.

Life is never the same as it was yesterday, unless the perceiver is stuck in a mental rut. Pay minute attention to your surroundings, and you'll find that absolutely everything changes perceptibly from one day to the next , including the quality of one's perception of that change.

Some say that the odds are becoming greater that life will not persist much longer, that because of the ways we've injured and degraded our environment, human life will most likely be extinguished before another century or two has passed. I say that's enough time for us to stop doing fresh damage and find ways to help the planet to begin to heal.

But if I'm wrong, and if life, like the empire, is doomed to expire soon, there's still time remaining "to see heaven in a wildflower, and eternity in a grain of sand."*

*William Blake