GENESIS

GENESIS.... THE MOLECULE
Who is this Molecule? Why is this minute geometry of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus… this Helix that replicates itself… that authors… that is the apparatus… why is it so thusly capable? How could it possibly continually supervise the trick of transferring an advantage of charge from electron to electron… so that a metabolism can go live and life happens? What is this combustion... this spark!... this heat I am conceived of… this that has born all before me, that has unfolded me… and boom! that I continue on as… on and on, decade after decade? So why, how, what? Who is this that has unfolded itself into a transcription of proteins that programs… programs what is biology… programs the profundity of this Earthly paradise. How is this that has unwound into these bustling, brawny bodies of the living? O the wondrousness of what is, of what continues… O me here breathing. O life, o me, o all my Relatives… here… here unfolding as respiration? O this Molecule!!!!O this Molecule that plays, that dabbles…that is the revelation… this Molecule that works us all as fodder, as warriors… here, here in time, here epoch after epoch upon this Earth. O, this biosphere reverberating, revolving.

O, this Molecule… the dear Majesty of this Molecule of a double helix… I get it… you are as a divinity… a goddess… you create… you design… your palette is the atomic fabric of creation. You… He, It… She…you are our Maker, our Preserver, and you detail our destruction. You are me, my body, my brain. You engineer, manufacture, and then You do the driving. And when my motor runs no longer… when my combustion goes cold… you recycle me… efficiently… recycle the organic back into the organic. Understand, we the living are composed of the dead… and the substances we are composed of will be dispersed and again reassembled… will continue life after life… cast and recast by the Molecule’s magic.

O, magnificent Molecule, O your majesty… the magic… you encode awareness. You even have encoded an awareness of yourself. Yes, what I call “me” is just this… self-awareness… I comprehend my metabolism, my DNA.I comprehend life… I witness the miracle. O, I am in awe… before my eyes… The Molecule replicates, adapts, feeds, maintains … covers this formidable Earth, fills oceans with its prodigy… lives on amid even the calamitous… lives on burning life’s flame now for billions of years…Boom! O, Molecule, why did you become you?

Dear majestic Molecule crafting this my metabolism as I sit… crafts my breathing, crafts the cognition as I sit writing this. Does craft the sight in my eyes, is crafting my hearing, is crafting this process of me thinking. It directs my inhalation, observes my oxygenation, and monitors the toxicity of my exhalation. It’s messengers have urged me to eat… are now desiring me to drink.!O magical Molecule! how amazingly elaborately simply stunningly you keep keeping on as me. O Molecule who fashions, repairs, and monitors the nearly inconceivable complexity of the chemical intricacies of the blood that I am… of the inconceivable cellular complexity of the electro-magnetic fantasia that is my fantastic brain… my brain with the god-like abilities to process, organize, and retain information… to discriminate and learn. How did that first package of nucleic acids become this? How could it ever design me? How did proto-proteins in solution become such a miraculous isolation… how could this system segregate itself… become a membrane to select the useful and avoid the useless, the toxic. How did these cells orchestrate… decide to work together… how did they come to divide, assign tasks… how did they learn to secrete calcium and house/shelter themselves? How did they learn to grow muscles and limbs and move? How?... how did these bits of nucleotides become such a set of information and become the entire majesty of what I see about me… and arrive at such an intelligence!?

Here in this Universe I inhabit, what do I know of the genesis… what do I comprehend? I have been told of hydrogen… told there is the fundamental of hydrogen which is the basic and original building block… is the simplest composition of charge, of spin, of the yin and yang/ the minus and plus of mass… is the mass of a proton and an electron. And it, Hydrogen, resides as the dust of space...the dust which becomes the colossal gravitation of star masses… becomes the fuel of fission/fusion which fuels the forges of super nova's. I visualize a wisp of a galactic dust cloud swirling forth, breaking away to become our solar system. In the cloud’s ring, thick with iron dust, the infantile mass we now know as Earth coalesced, orbited, and swept through the stuff of that cloud, the cloud of debris of a super nova. Water, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, the noble gases, the raft of minerals, gold, uranium… the periodic table of atoms… was collected, for millions and millions of rotations, for a billion years. The stuff fell from the sky, smashed to the surface.

And did The Molecule come encapsulated in some piece of debris… did it come locked in a bit of dust to fall into the primeval ocean? Such mystery! Is it that this Molecule cruises through space, travels as hundreds of billions of viral seeds from some parent on some planet… travels to be pulled down into the water of some fresh planet? To be resurrected? This is a notion that has appealed to some who ponder the origin of life. It is barely plausible. To the sci-fi fanciful, it is as plausible as the theory that the sterile salty waters of the primordial Earth accidentally produced The Molecule. Did The Molecule arrive from the far-flung depths of the Galaxy… has it come from the elsewhere of this vast quantum gamble? Did The Molecule come from some greater intelligence… come from some potent engineering on some other carbon-based watery planet… come from an occult being who sends it drifting over the millions of the light-years of this Universe.

But O, my brain, my cognition… the human brain, the human ability to conceive… is not wired to comprehend the stretch of a billion years. A million, million years? I am not even able to truthfully conceive of the galactic-time blip of a hundred thousand years. Who is comfortable with, cognizant of the dimensional distance of a light year? Sure, our brains fix the words, fix the concept, let them slide off our tongues, but a million years is how many lifetimes? A light year is how many football fields long? Ouch. I pride myself on my imaginative abilities, but the best I can do is conceive of the timeframe of seven human generations… 140 years ahead, 140 years behind.

So, consider… Earth revolved around the sun for a billion years... and then, in the geological record, there appeared the footprint of life. The doings of The Molecule. After a billion years there appeared the footprint of a self-energized orderliness that had formed colonies... did organize the systematic capture of atomic bonding to maintain a chemical routine that could reassemble itself. And replicate itself it did… did replicate multitudes of membraned life-coded-programmed packages…replicated intelligent packages of proteins interacting, massaging the capacities of molecules. And The Genetic Molecule is now over three billion (3 BILLION!) years old. These little, systematic, membraned cells which absorb food and manipulate…these microbes are still here having sustained and replicated countless times. O, these venerable microbes, still here as if on steroids… have sophisticated … have evolved into giant communal units… units which hunt and chase each other about… units equipped with mandibles, with teeth, with beaks to consume each other.

So, over the first billion years of the planet, it is understood certain waters of the Earth became rich with goopy molecules. Big messy molecules became enriched with chemical energy, with latent chemical potential. And perhaps… perhaps like the proverbial immortal monkey pounding on a typewriter… the structure, the working of The Molecule was written. Eventually. Successfully. And it needed to happen only but once. A Goldilocks moment. A billion years apparently was enough time to get it done. Or perhaps, even, it was time enough for an alien virus, The Molecule, to drift into the Solar System and seed Earth’s Ocean… an ocean ready with potency.

So, viola… me…you… here. Yea! Here aware, moving, planning, consuming. Hey… hey turn up that base track! And hand me an apple from that tree with a grinning snake on it.