Who
is the Alien?
“...I
sit at my desk now
like a
tiny proprietor,
a cottage
industry in every cell.
My blood
runs laps;
I doubt
yours does,
but we
share an abstract fever
called
thought,
a common
swelter of sun.
So Beast,
pause a moment,
you are
welcome here.
I am life,
and life loves life.”
Diane
Ackerman (excerpt “Ode to the Alien” from “Wife of Light”)
Many of my friends and
family have been checking out their ancestry through DNA. Some are
surprised when the results come back. One friend told me Friday night
that he was mostly Northern European, and 4% Neanderthal. I said, “I
could have told you that!” Another friend, a well-respected lawyer
and professor, said that most of his relatives sneaked across our
southern border four generations ago. None of us is pure bred—our
dogs have better pedigrees. Which makes it all the more surprising
that we are still so clannish.
Recently, there was a TED
talk about this subject. Seth Godin, marketer and author, says the
internet has revived a social unit from the deep past—tribes. Now,
however, our tribes are bound by shared ideas and values, rather than
blood-kinship. It doesn't take much in the way of social stress to send us packing
back to the territory of I-me-and-mine. Only, now our territory may
include people from anywhere in the world. There is speculation that
we may actually end up with one common world language simply because
differences in language were originally intended to identify the
tribe. If you spoke our language, it meant you were “one of us,”
and acceptable—if not, well...
I love the imagery in
Diane Ackerman's poem, “Ode to the Alien.” She points out our
cellular activity—“a cottage industry in every cell”—referencing
the mitochondria that power the processes inside our cells. They are the
little engines of energy, which were once alien creatures. Now
symbiotic, we cannot survive without them. There is a clue in there
somewhere. We all love life, don't we?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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