Imagine a marble larger than your head. It could be a bowling ball, an old-fashioned cannonball, or one of those old-school leather exercise medicine balls. A beach ball, basketball, or something round and like a head. A large marble can be a biggie. But we’re talking about a sad little, lonely blue marble. Like the planet Earth, which is only much smaller and floating across the universe.
Call it what you like, you can’t have a world without a head to imagine it. A marble smaller than many bulbous roundish objects is a peewee or mini. Most brains hanging out inside human heads fall into the category of peewee. You could lose your marbles or forget where they are when you’re full-grown and leave your playthings behind.
Like our prehistoric ancestors, predators with pea brains, we survived, evolving out of a mass extinction event that wiped out our dinosaur predecessors into the wild humanoid post-binary monstrous species we are today. Are we of and from the earth, or, in fact, the entirety of the cosmos? Are we separate from the planet? Coming from some distant galaxy far away from this place. How arrogant to believe we are alone in the universe! Right next door to the sun and up close and personal to the moon.
This is the place we call home. Born into this mess, it’s hard to believe we’re part of anything less unknown in the known universe. Considering the fact that we messed up everything here long ago, all that we need—air, water, food, etc.—is tainted with plastics and other toxic chemicals and disgusting poisons. Human beings, being human. We’re slowly evolving into microplastic-made bionic cyborgs.
Our species is composed of percentile parts hydrogen and carbon and combined fat cells of flesh and bone. Organic minerals, proteins, and H20. Plus a few other atomic particles of synthetic things, including a lot of hot gas produced by the consumption of nutrients and a ton of inedible crap we don’t need to eat for survival. But we love the sugary, salted, greasy anything, either hot or cold. The strong alcoholic beverages that we enjoy are so addictive and detrimental to our health that we require more. We ingest chemicals because it makes us feel good. None of these substances are necessary for good health, but it makes us momentarily happy to be down with the inevitable disease and sickness and the momentary illusion of health and happiness.
Like a small blue marble, we’re obsolete, insignificant objects. We’re vain, petty, judgmental beings who can’t carry a tune of truth, or see past our past. Dwelling in the present while waiting for a future that may not come. It might arrive, like a dream, crouching on the ground, playing marbles in the dirt from whence we came. I read a short poem about an old man who found a blue marble in the ground while digging in his garden. It was the same blue marble he had played with as a young boy. The marble lay buried there for 76 years. In his withered fingers, he held it up to the sun as the glass orb glistened against an azure sky. His entire life flashed bright before his eyes like a movie of coming attractions that had already happened. He turned the little blue marble over and around until he began to laugh at himself. Then he cried aloud. A sorrowful moaning wail. He put the marble in his mouth and swallowed it. He wanted to keep that marble's memory alive, if only a little longer. Then he reimagined that if he died, he planned to be with his blue marble, buried six feet deep. Likewise, he’s so lost and found and forgotten again eternally.
We’re all part of something bigger than ourselves. I don’t know what that something is about, and can’t tell you how we got here or where we went afterward. But it’s important to remember ourselves and how we arrived at this conclusion, only to be here now. The end is near the beginning, for all we know. A sad little story about a blue marble in a blue world. A full blue moon rises only once every few years, and all the phases of the sun spin in the same tired orbit. Synchronized perfectly, well done for the yearly daydreams of mere existence. Left to ponder the night before it begins. After closing your eyes, finally, one fine morning.