Alchemical Tea Leaves

For as long as this tiny three inch space exists for me to cram little words into I am happy.

Big words fit here too, although they may be looked down upon as snobbish or as lurid examples of wanna-be intellect. Covering up with words is for lawyers and geologists -- pretty much anybody who works in a profession for which words are a necessity of life knows the protection of a secret language. A language encrypted by education and experience takes time to decode and perhaps generations to write.

A lot of this exists today. The arcane and the codifed. Some of it is bound to protect us too. It's for this reason that parents babyproof their living spaces when that child is due to arrive. Some things you just don't need to experience.

However lead is turned to gold in our own lives we almost all of us share the belief in our dominion over nature. The choices we make with the precious little time we have beyond the virtual chemistry of making a living might allow some of us to learn several secret languages. And with that some may yet make some sense out of the crucible into which these languages mix and make the world in which we live. And yes, even the environment is different from the one we inherited from our hunter-gatherer forebears. Consider roaming now. You won't get too far with a fence in the way, nor will the branded herds be yours for the taking.

Let the words grapple with themselves. Dominion over stewardship. Humana Vitae and the creation into which God placed Adam and Eve without promising them life everlasting. Consider a chain of generations moving in isolation from and toward speciation now capable of massing into one humanity. Uni-culture. Uni-gene. All because none of us can truly read the spectrum of color reflected by the chlorophil in the leaf of a plant. The bush was burning, not talking.

Where would we stop if we finally discovered how to speak with the tea leaves instead of tramping them. Or what if a person knew exactly what to eat and in what quantity to completely satisfy every cell in his or her body. Even our evolution has taken us away from the fine-grained understanding each cell has of its own needs in its own environment. We might be better off to detect chemicals and their harm at the level an ant would. But since this is impossible without genetically altering ourselves we resort to technology to solve what our own senses can not. We build canaries for our coal mines, and we hope to detect the cumulative impact of our concentrated presence in things like sewage treatment plants, garbage dumps and nuclear decommissioning.

The roads must roll -- and all the people on it.