The Evolution Sutra

Over the course of three and a half billion years volcanoes erupted, continents bumped into each other, ice ages came and went, and life kept figuring out new ways to live, growing new appendages, plumage, camouflage, new ways of sensing, eating and moving. Nature is the sculptor, carving and coaxing all life forms into being. Nature is the artist, and we are the art.

Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking. You should penetrate these words. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. ~ The Mountains and Waters Sutra, Zen Master Dogen

Geologic events have molded us. A meteor crashing to earth sixty-five million years ago has been linked to atmospheric changes that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, allowing for the subsequent evolution of larger mammals, present company included. The dinosaurs toppled over, and there we were, the ones who nurse their young -- the hairy ones.

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More recent geologic and atmospheric events are associated with the emergence of our species, homo sapiens. Twelve to fifteen million years ago the land mass of Africa was dramatically altered by tectonic forces, producing the Great Rift Valley which erected an east-west barrier to the existing animal populations. As a result, the common ancestor of humans and apes was divided, and each group began evolving under different conditions. They got the jungle and we got the savannah.

Suddenly our human ancestors had no trees to live in or escape into, and boy, it must have been scary. The savannah was full of lions and tigers and hyenas ready to pounce and gobble you up, so you desperately try to see out over the tall grasses, but you really aren't big enough. So what do you do? You stand up on two legs. Bi-pedalism may have partially been born of fear.

The ice ages are now recognized as a major force in the emergence of homo sapiens. Scientists believe that our family of Hominidae came into existence during the colder weather of the late Miocene, seven millions years ago, and our genus Homo, along with those of cattle and gazelles came into existence during another cooling period two and one half million years ago, the late Pliocene. Our tremendous human energy and ingenuity may have a lot to do with the fact that we were cold. Consciousness and the opposable thumb may have originally been designed as tools for shoveling snow. 

We mankind, arose amidst the wandering of the ice and marched with it. We are in some sense shaped by it, as it has shaped the stones. Perhaps our very fondness for the building of stone alignments, dolmens, and pyramids reveals unconsciously an ancient heritage from the ice itself, the earth shaper. ~ Loren Eisley, All the Strange Hours

And just think of it, my earthling friends, here we are spinning around on the earth's axis at about 1,000 miles an hour. (That may be why we get dizzy and bump into each other.) Meanwhile, the earth is spinning around the sun at about 66 thousand miles an hour, and the entire solar system is spinning though the Milky Way Galaxy at a million miles an hour toward a point in space that astronomers call the Great Attracter. Yea, baby! And everything attracted to the Great Attractor is moving at about 800 thousand miles an hour toward a super cluster of galaxies called the Shapely Attractor. Whoa, earthlings, this mother ship Gaia is moving fast! And you don't even have to hold on. Because the earth is holding on to you, like the dear mother she is, embracing you with her strong arms of gravity. Even black guys can't jump all that far off the earth.

We are on the earth and of the earth. It is the true "rock of ages." It is the Milky Way's little biosphere project, and everybody's ‘hood.

So let's offer praise and reverence to the home planet. We could turn Earth Day into a major international holiday, and maybe even celebrate an "earth day" every month, on full moon. (The moon is also a child of the earth, and helps keep our oceans waving and our orbit stable.)

Earth days are not just a call to "do something" to heal our damaged eco-systems, but more of a spiritual exercise, a time to celebrate all life, regardless of kingdom, phyla, or species: regardless of color of skin, feathers, fur, flowers, leaves, or bark. Earth days will be a time to reflect on our connection to this planet, and to embrace our basic identity as earthlings.

The Divine DNA

There is a simple grandeur in this view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that while this, our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of changes, have gone on replacing each other, so that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved.