The Earth's Golden Skin

If the vulture riding warm air currents far above my head craned its bald neck downward, it would see a mite inching across the earth's golden skin. If it tucked its mottled brown wings and dove towards the ground with eyes trained at it, the speck would grow and split into a mule caked in sand, and my long figure ten paces behind her, both walking. My rough cotton robe billows and snaps in the wind and my legs are locked in low repeating strides forward, varying only to step over a clump of dung occasionally produced by my tired mule. Sand spins into the air in hot gusts and flies across the desert, finding its way beneath my clothing and under the straps of my sandals, grinding into my flesh. I plead with the desert before I take each step to reveal the top of a great mountain or palace, for its rise over the curve of the earth and gradual enlargement as I walk would give me a definite goal. With something looming in the distance, I could force my head down and trudge along, glancing up every thousand steps to surprise myself at the jump in size that occurred gradually as I stared into the sand. For some stretches, it may feel as though it grew no closer, and that the earth was falling away from the object at the same speed that I walked towards it. Still, this would be preferable to the empty skyline that I squint at instead. The sky stretches downward without a single tree, rock, or artificial structure to prevent it from meeting the distant blond earth along the horizon. Its blankness gives me no way to check my progress and I am left with no proof that each labored step is leading me to anything besides the same dead earth I walk over now. This dark thought burrows deep into my mind and manifests itself in physical symptoms of despair. My breath shortens, forcing deep painful gasps, which are as successful at inhaling sand as they are for capturing oxygen. My lungs tighten more, and every couple steps I flex my jaw and gulp the dry air, an action that an onlooker might mistake for a scream drowned out by the desert wind. A sharp pain shifts around my body before settling deep within my chest, closer to my back than my sternum.  Any twist of the torso or bend in my spine grazes the bony and cartilaginous segments of my body against the irritated membrane of my lungs, so I flatten my arms against my sides and march forward with careful and deliberate stiffness. Fed up with pondering hypotheticals and desperate for a distraction from the growing internal discomfort, I scan the landscape for a new source of contemplation. My gaze falls on the haunches of my mule and my leather sack of water bouncing up and down with her slow gait. But this sight is no better than the blank horizon, for my bitter mind instantly pictures the seams of the sack weakening by the heat of the sun and the rough motion of the mule's step, spilling my water into the sand with a hiss, and in turn, ensuring I will never leave this strange land. With the only two views available to me in this featureless landscape proving to be sources of dread, I snap my eyes shut and trust my mule's straight march ahead as she steadily pulls at the leather strap that connects us. There is no darkness behind my eyelids, for the sun is still high and passes through the soft skin, casting dull orange light into my retinas. As I blindly walk, my consciousness ebbs away from thoughts about sand and heat or the uncertainty of my future to difficult confrontations of my past that arise whenever I am alone for long enough.

When my mind wanders into reflection, it wastes no time mulling over anything that has occurred since my early youth. The most significant moments in my life occurred at the dawn of my existence, and I have spent much of my time sickened by them since then. The raw, strictly sensory memories of my infancy have been reworked in my head into a cohesive story. To form this narrative, I cast into a sea of indescribable perceptions, and pull from them a maladroit story that captures my experience similar to how a trawl net might fare catching plankton. Some few organisms become nestled in its fibers but countless more drift through undisturbed, as countless experiences remain deep within me, but are rendered inaccessible by the limitations of my adult mind fixed by language. With this story, I weave in events I was ignorant of as an infant, but occurred simultaneously and have been described to me later.

In the beginning, my consciousness was as loose as the warm fluid that enveloped my shapeless being. My experience was disorganized, but utterly free, for when I first encountered reality, it was not a representation authored by my mind. Unbridled by thoughts framed by language, and undivided into different senses, I knew only the pressure of being whole. I felt the attraction that held my matter together, and opposed to it, I felt the infinite tug that starts the moment life begins, and will always succeed in returning complexity to disorder. These two forces perpetually struggle within every fiber of my being, but I have never confronted them fully since this period of formation. From my inception, I understood that this life was temporary. It was my awareness of the unyielding pull on my life-force determined to cut the bonds that form my organism that spurred my first realization of mortality. It was a deeper understanding that wasn’t held back by a clumsy marriage to language or a memory, I felt it, and in moments of complete emptiness, it returned. Crawling up my spine before being quickly crowded out by screams of hunger, pain, anxiety, and anger that form my conscious thoughts. As my being took shape, this singular awareness was replaced by the senses that allowed me to take in my environment but robbed me of my ability to constantly feel the balancing act of life itself. 

Slowly, the nerves strung throughout my tender skin felt the warm liquid I was suspended in, my translucent ears picked up muffled sounds and vibrations from the outside world, and reddish dull light occasionally shone into my half-formed eyes. With these new abilities, I confronted my strange world, and with no knowledge of anything beyond my little realm, I understood the universe as a soft and muted place. For the next four months, I was a living sensor, picking up on the faint intrusions of stimulus from outside, but unable to comprehend any aspect of my existence and surroundings other than what occasionally shone into my eyes or activated my hearing. My thoughts were alien, for my mind had no complexity, but there were no primitive desires for food, water, and warmth either. I wanted and needed nothing. I came into existence completely content, and I will never find it again, for no matter how sated I am, I have an implicit understanding that there always will be a time when hunger and thirst return. 

For the year I formed within my mother, the sun oppressed the land and its inhabitants. When it rose, there was no liminal period of gentle warmth between night and day, and one could almost hear the dew drops sizzle off the blades of grass in the early morning. As each rainless day progressed, the heat would push deeper into the earth, sending cracks through the dry ground and filling boulders with enough warmth to sustain the brutal temperature when its source dipped below the horizon. Animals withdrew deep into caves and crevices, men and women lay awake through the long nights drenched in sweat, and everything was pale and brittle. 

As most people looked up to the sky and prayed for relief, some bold ones glanced lustfully at the faint silhouettes of snow-capped mountains to the North and considered leaving their increasingly uninhabitable homeland. For the first few months, fear of the unknown prevented the radical idea of migration from gaining popularity, but as food supplies dwindled and rivers dried up, every man, woman, and child began to gaze at the distant peaks. Despite their instinctual urge to escape the wretched climate, people persevered, but all understood that this way of life was not sustainable. On a particularly hot evening, as the sun melted into the endless dusty plains to the east, Ullo gathered the people below the ancient walnut tree that marked the village center. His skin was stretched tight over his bones, and cracks ran deep along the base of every joint and feature. Ullo was an old man before the great heat wave, but now he looked like a dying man, and those who couldn’t bear to gaze at his skeletal face directly chose to study his clothing instead. Iridescent shell necklaces from distant lands weighed down his neck, and colorful dried songbirds hung by leather strips stitched to the elder's roughly sewn robe. After staring several miles off in the distance at the crumbling adobe hut where he was born over a hundred years before, he raised his stern gaze to the malnourished and sunburnt people desperate for guidance, “We have dug deep within the earth to find water, ate rats and lizards, ground nuts and tree bark into our depleted stocks of flour, and each day feels more unbearable than the last. We now have a great choice. Wait for a change that may never come, or leave our home. We can choose to be hopeful for the future and ignore our bleak outlook, but our beliefs are independent of the fate of that great beast in the sky. That is why we must go North. Our prayers allow trees to bear fruit, let arrows pierce the thick hides of wild animals, and bring healthy children into this world, but the sun does not serve us alone, and so we cannot change it. The shift that brought the sun upon us with unwanted intensity, must have also brought perfect conditions upon distant people and lifted another tribe out of the equally miserable cold. We alone do not get to decide the alignment of the source of all life in this world, despite the harm it brings to us in our home. We must go north, and maybe one day we can return, or perhaps never.” The people left in silence, but everyone knew that he was right. The heat suddenly felt less potent on the skin of the older generation as they realized it is all that stood in the way of departing this world in the same place they entered it in. As they trudged home, the youth lingered and stared towards the mountains in the north, although they were blanketed in darkness. They felt drawn towards them with a deep curiosity and restlessness that couldn’t be explained by just the temperature or Ullo’s words. 

In the late hours of the night, not resulting from the many sacrifices, chants, and quiet prayers of the people, but because of an inevitable atmospheric oscillation ten-thousand years in the making, dark clouds snuffed out the constellations and the sky opened up. People ran outside their homes in a trance, lifted their hands upward, and let the fat droplets soothe their cracked lips and dry mouths. 

The collision between two opposites will undoubtedly bring about rapid change. The further the conditions stray in one direction from equilibrium, the smaller the difference in the other direction is required to reverse it. This rule applies to the interaction of any great extreme with a hint of its polar opposite: the utmost cruelty met with compassion or deliberate ignorance in the face of simple reason, but no reaction is grander than the mixture of opposing natural forces, for they are not defined or limited by humans. When a glowing clay pot is first removed from an oven, one splash of cold water is enough to send fractures throughout its smooth orange body. When the rain struck, the arid earth that held boulders in place, tree roots secure, and composed the homes of my village melted away. After a year devoid of moisture, the world flipped into a state of complete fluidity and saturation, and the people rejoiced, bathing themselves in the cool mud. After an hour of gleeful immersion in the dark pools that formed in low points of the land, the dawn light turned the edges of the storm clouds pink and revealed the destruction brought by the rain they had prayed for every night for three-hundred days.

One woman didn't run out into the alien landscape created by the downpour. Lying in a nest of wool blankets, she clutched at them with tiny white fists and cried out in agony, but her screams were swallowed by the rain pounding against her hut. As the pain of her labor increased in frequency and intensity, the earthen dome that sheltered her lost its shape. Her home fell onto her in heavy clumps, blocking first her vision, and then her airways. In her final moments, either from a deliberate effort to save her child or subconscious response to her fading life-force that commanded her muscles to perform one final contraction, she pushed me from her womb and quietly left the earth.

I do not consider this moment my birth, for the simultaneous death of my mother and my exit from her body simply pushed me from one dark featureless world to another. My entrance into the world was less abrupt than most, for dry hands and sunlight didn’t greet me to contrast the colorless and frictionless world I had occupied. I can only recall the taste and grit of the muddy water, for my eyes were still clamped shut, but I imagine that I would have felt disappointed if I had been capable of any emotion dependent on comparison. After enduring the pressure and trauma of being pushed out the womb, to drown within conditions similar to the ones perfectly designed and regulated to preserve and grow my being, just colder and coarser, would have been a sad and strange existence. But, by divine will or simple randomness, I survived this unlikely entrance into the world. Before the sun hit my face, I had been immersed inside both of my creators: my poor mother and the earth which has guided all life. My departure from the womb was just a brief transitional period between them, and when gnarled hands plucked me from the thickening pool of mud and severed my umbilical cord between their finger and thumb, I was born. 

Ullo held me up to the sky and let the harsh rain purge the dirt from every crevice of my body. The growing light and the shower revealed my strange form, and Ullo ran his stiff fingers over my curved spine, gangly limbs, and narrow skull with silent uneasiness. There was no consistency to my features and my long pointed bones appeared to be in danger of rupturing my translucent skin. Surrounding us, illuminated faintly by dawn, was the destruction of our home and the cries of glee from our people. The heat had left the air, but it took our village with it.