Do not despair for Earth, beloved.
All you know will pass away
but in the mortal life of Gaia
a billion years are yet to be.
With her a hundred thousand years
is as a half a day,
and a cycle of seasons is just a beat
of the pulse that cleanses the world.
So look to the sea where her cycles reset.
Consider the coastal ocean
where infusion of open sky
meets the dissolution of land.
It happens atom by atom in the vastness
of a droplet where a thousand algae
live out their lives basking the paths
of sunbeams, drawing carbon from the sea.
Out of a thousand, a broken cell settles
out of the sunlit realm, down through dark
abyssal depths it drifts to oblivion,
atoms entombed on the ocean floor.
As seasons crowd the centuries
in the stately drift of millennia,
what happens to microscopic lives
clears the air and heals the sea.
For as sure as aged detrital muck
locks carbon into hardened rock;
as sure as winter’s freeze and thaw
and summer squalls carve paths in stone;
as sure as the Rockies erode to the Plains,
sink into seas and rise again;
as sure as the God of second chances
is God of seventy times seven chances –
Gaia will weave an Eden again.
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| Diatoms. Wikipedia image by Prof. Gordon T. Taylor, Stony Brook University - corp2365, NOAA Corps Collection, Public Domain |
