With light fading into twilight as the sun steals below the western horizon painting the cloudbase creamcicle orange I am pondering. So many thoughts floating disorganized in the messy closet of my mind with no real sense or semblance of order.

Out of the mire of it all like a well-preserved body surfacing in a bog comes an idea I have contemplated many times before. At our smallest bits (whatever they are); at our sub-atomic quantum level we are inanimate. There is not a single bit of us at that level that has even a shade of life in it…nothing…

I find it odd that all of these little inanimate bits…these invisible bricks, can be organized in just such a way to become something that contemplates its own existence. I find it mysterious that all these little dead things can become lives that live, love, kill one-another, make more of one-another, laugh, cry, sing, dance and…given the scope of their sentience in the vastness of time and space…worry about things like money and whether other people like them.

We are clearly more than the sum of our parts and this is why scientific inquiry (as much as I truly appreciate it) will never come to grips with who and what we are through its method of backward engineering. We are something more than robots. Of course I believe there is a ghost in the machine – the great imago dei – but it doesn’t lessen the mystery of it all, if anything it magnifies it.

I am this thing, this great doppleganger, this golem of clay made ultimately from nothing – ex nihilo. I am a shadow enclosing a spark that has come from outside of all things and keeps me in a constant state of conflict with myself. I want, like so may other animals to simply eat, sleep, shit, make more of me and die…but another part of me wants more…it wants to rule, to love, to create, to raise the dead, heal the sick…it wants to live forever…it wants to worship.

We are small monstrous gods with our belongings packed into kerchiefs tied to sticks slung over our shoulders and we are on the road between home and nowhere wondering how we got where we are…

It is times like this after darkness has descended and I am alone with my demon thoughts that I feel homesick for wherever I came from…so terribly, achingly homesick.