Maybe some very lucky monkey happened to eat the right mushrooms and after sharing them with her family, began to understand the importance of sound and vision, pulling together the first loose threads of what would eventually become a complex and living tapestry of human communication and language.  

Maybe Eve bit into an apple offered by a serpent with questionable intent, and realizing her wrongdoing, immediately turned to her partner-the only other living being like her in existence-and said, “Hey Adam, you really ought to have a bite of this-I don’t know, let’s call it an ‘apple’-it’s quite tempting.”

Every culture has it’s origin of life story. Every religion has it’s origin of life story. All of them are beautiful and rich in significance, not just for the people of origin, but for the world at large, as an important weave in this fabric of our collective ingenuity. Science sobers our imagination into hard facts and evidence, still beautiful in its scope, but perhaps not as appealing to the masses in it’s telling.

Maybe it’s all the same event, or long chain of events, presented in different ways. It’s in our nature as human beings to retell the same stories over and over.

Do we really think that’s a twenty-first century phenomenon? “A Star Is Born” is literally how we came into existence as a universe.

We really only know one story. We’ve been telling it in such a myriad of ways, repeating and rehashing it, with omissions and embellishments for different times and different people, that we’ve lost sight of the original narrative.

First there was nothing, then there was something, and out of that something came everything. Everything, including us. That’s it. That’s the truth, and a matter of fact and of fiction or mythology. Nothing, something, everything. That is the entire template of our existence as far as we know, distilled and purposely simplified into three easy words. Nothing. Something. Everything. Fill in the spaces with whatever you like, but this is the tabula rasa, the clean slate from which all our stories spring forth.

No matter your creed or skin color or sexual orientation or gender or weight or physical ability or mental capacity or emotional stability; whether you’re happy, sad, pensive, brutish, petty, crass, humble, saintly, or a goddamn demon spawn, There is absolutely no distinction or division that can be conceived or contrived  that falls outside of this equation. We are the unifying field. All of us. Everything. All life is connected by the beginning. We all stretch back to that first fucking spark. I’d like to think that’s where we go when our time on earth is over, but I’ll leave that ramble for another day.