Emergence

 Creation. Then long, murky nothingness. The split seconds of cosmic existence are riotously busy, sorting forms and chains and possibilities out from so much entangled soup. This complexity is rife. Emergence sidesteps haphazard annihilation, slips under and between the hammering forges that will eventually ignite stars, spin gravity. 

Emergence doubles. Triples. Exponential expedience, up and up, all contained pristinely in those first less-than-seconds. It is a universe of tiny vastness, experiencing it’s very first dawn. Light and Darkness are given their definitions. Emergence is glorious, a glorious wave of understanding that arches up and out and across like a sun hungry blossom, reaching for praiseworthy daylight. When the First True Second is over, Darkness reigns over the primordial soup. But the Emergence remains. 

It remains when swirling eddies bulge, compress, ignite! It remains when microcosmic fragments spiral and spin, growing ever surely larger across billions of years. Emergence is the master of everything when the first galaxy is completed, a loose milky spiral woven over invisible dark matter bones. Emergence is the master of everything when the first stars, bloated red lanterns swollen by helium gluttony, die their glorious stellar deaths. Emergence is the master of everything, and it is alone. 

Incalculable worlds. Things that crawl, squirm, fly. Things made of silicon, carbon. Things that bleed acid, gasoline, helium. Emergence sifts through worlds like an eager child sifting through sand for precious treasures. But the eons pass. Silent eons of vastness, mindlessness, and sameness. Emergence speaks to itself in two voices about its discoveries. They speak thusly: 

There is awareness. 

How can you know that?

They speak amongst themselves! 

And so do atoms, surely, and molecules; all things small must cooperate to make forms.

They respond to changes, I have seen them become campfire huddles into fusion-torchmakers. Surely, this ingenuity is worthy.

And so insects will build great mounds, tiny scuttling fragments beneath oceans morphing flat plains into pockmarked highways for their passage. Do they have mind, too?

Weapons are among their feats. Stones, spears swift as winds. Now, bombs and bullets that hold fragments of a stars hungry detonation. Look here, and here, across the heavens for the remnants of their battlefields. 

Will you look for a mind in a wildfire next? No? What about a supernova, or a plague? What they wield could not even wound us, couldn’t unravel an iota of our most pathetic projects and colossal accidents.

They send their voices out into the dark. 

So too does the hiss of hydrogen and a far away birth. There is no poetry in it, no understanding. We are alone.