I woke up, threw a load of laundry into the machine (since I was planning to bike to Santa Monica and was unsure what clothes were available), and took a bath while waiting.
I brought Children of Time for some bath-time reading, lay back into the warm water, and dove into another universe...
The first two chapters were beautiful hooks: the megalomaniacal scientist escapes, and the huntress finds a mate! (Let me know if you'd like a full review of the book in the comments section below.)
Then my body protested a bit, so I put the book away and sat up in the water, and that's when I realized...
That I was sitting in a soup of me.
Yet, I went further, and wanted to taste the soup.
Then I imagined the soup passing through me, and back into the soup, the cycle continuing forever.
Soup is a wonderful blend of solids and liquids, warming the belly and used to heal us from the hands of our mothers, the next step after feeding from the teet. (Even a soup of hamburger buns, I imagine.)
Then I became a multilimbed, multiheaded God, sitting in my own creation, molding Worlds from the sludge while sustaining my form eating the soup (reminding me of the antagonist of Pandora's Star, whose life cycle involved releasing single cell versions of itself to multiply, whose various larger descendants became a future food source), and I wondered: how is this sustainable?
How can we make this real? After all, this is what we are doing, if we have the scope of thought to truly see that we all eat where we shit.
And I thought of the cells in our bodies, which do exactly that: stay in one place, eating and shitting, trusting in all their neighbors, in the environment, in life itself to sustain it.
It became a challenge to myself:
To trust myself to sustain the world.
