Beyond the Horizon: A Pilgrimage into Deep-Time Stories

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Let’s open with a poem

A power outage,

is not an aberration.

It is the old normal world

poking through

into the aberration

of tech depending on tech depending on tech depending on

the world.

Wind, water, weather, creature.

This wild wild world.

What is it to be cut off from ancestral stories?

When gaps to appear between generations, between children and adolescents, adolescents and adults, adults and elders? When these age ranges become stratified. When the movement between these ranges becomes sparse.

We still have our genetics, from our parents and our grandparents and on back.

Going back. Each generation with two parents and each of them with two, branching back and back. Still, we have those genetics within us. We also inherit language and customs and talents and traumas.

But what do we lose when the stories get interrupted? When we don't sit with our parents and hear about our grandparents. When we don't receive cultural stories from our kin, but instead are immersed in stories crafted to capture and entertain us. Crafted by those we will never meet.

It used to be that age ranges mixed in everyday life, from can’t-see to can’t-see. Of hearing about those who've departed: grandparents, grand uncles and aunts, great grandparents and on. From being nested amongst the bodies of kindred relations, with stories being passed amongst us,

from mouth to ear to heart to hands to mouth to ear to heart to feet to song to ear to belly to breath to song to ear.

Stories adapting, stories weaving past into present and passing the present on

through ears and hearts and hands and feet

into the future.

Such a delicate, fragile form of knowledge , and yet it is the most enduring form we have. Still we have stories that are tens of thousands of years old. They’re still with us today, after plagues and floods and invasions.

Thank you for staying with us.

What stories will we tell when the screens go dim, when the vast cooled data banks grow silent? When the pages in books tot or burn, or people forget how to decipher the codes.

What will we speak to each other about these times? What words of warning might we pass on to warn our kindred descendants of toxic zones that we created for a few decades of power. Lands which will need warning of for thousands of years to come. What stories might we tell so those people who come after may know to tend those sites, so the consequences are not as grave as they might be. Tend them when the fifty or a hundred year mechanisms containing them break down. Tend the leaks, contain the radiation. Tend and perhaps begin to remedy the great rifts and damages that they will inherit.

What stories might we pass on to help those who come after?

What lore might we pass on to them that will be useful for what they will surely face.

What will we pass on?

What lore?

Until the nextHappy creatingTheo

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