Chapter 1 

Did we ever suspect that Earth was actually ugly compared to all the other earths in the universe? Few people thought about it and assumed, as I did, that Earth was beautiful because of its life and color beating out to a black, sullen universe, surrounded by bland objects like the moon and Venus, Mercury and the rest of them. If they knew though how impossibly beautiful some places are in the universe, a beauty we can’t contemplate because we don’t have the visual language to compute the shapes and colors. Perhaps it wouldn’t move people one way or the other but I knew better. I had seen the other side. I knew the facts of the matter. It wasn’t that Earth was ugly but that it was plain in the scheme of things. But as I used to hear from time to time, “what they don’t know doesn’t hurt them.”

I loved her. She had been sustenance. She had taught me the rudiments of cold and heat, light and dark, color and whiteness. She had exposed me to some interesting mountain ranges and life in the ocean depths. She had put me on an ice sheet as the sun passed. She had been a companion. She had claimed all those I had known and would claim the rest. Graveyard and seed source. That’s what she was. She had taught our eyes how to see precisely and separate light from objects so I was delighted when the precise and separate met in surprising ways.

But I needed to move on. I needed to know my new environment, huge as it was. I was an awkward idiot and knew little at that time but something urged me to go on, to let the Earth go, that I would return.

David Eide
January 24, 2014