Rainbow in My Smile
"I wander lonely as a cloud". Will-u-r an anachronism. Today's clouds leave no room for the lonely. They are crammed with bits and bytes, LLMs and AGIs. They have been polluted with 24 karat greed and unfettered speed traps.(1)
Your loneliness, however, echoes a timeless cry from the human soul, albeit on another wavelength. We too are lonely. We hide behind isms and slogans. We let corporate malfeasance flourish so that we can screen ourselves from individual responsibility. Our dog did not eat our homework: our passivity allowed the worst of us to overshadow the rest of us. We are moral cowards donning white hats to conceal dark urges, too often full of sound and fury signifying nothing. at least nothing wholesome. (2)
Are we the new/not-so-new brachiopods? You will recall that brachiopods ruled the ocean floors from 540 to 250 million years ago. They were evolving new shell shapes and new ecologies, yet were unable to diversify and were almost destroyed by the end-Permian mass extinction 252 million years ago. (3)
Charles Darwin's finches faced a similar fate. Even with some local genetic diversity they might have failed to survive. What appears to have saved them from extinction is termed "sink-source dynamics", meaning that large groups of immigrant birds from other islands brought healthy diversity.
It seems that immigrant populations are essential to survival.
Without such diversity, humans could produce faulty genomes, like my own. Mine has a number - 230,800 . There are only 10,000 cases of 230,800 in the United States. This mutant enzyme resulted from the dictates of religious grey-beards, who insisted that first cousins should marry. My parents obeyed, blissfully unaware of the serpent in the genetic garden. (4)
I was the result, defective, an anomaly, an other-than.
Until I realized...
The oceans need no teaspoon to validate themselves. Why do I?
I had to learn to embrace otherness as an essential part of myself.
I had to learn to identify with rainbows: we are here because we are supposed to be.
And so are you.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2024 and always
(1)William Wordsworth
(2) With apologies to another William, this time Shakespeare, and MacBeth.
(3) Brachiopods
(4)"Women Artists of the American West".
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copyright 2024 Corinne Whitaker
