01. Preface to the Journals –

My gene pool, my stock, this tribe, arose in the veldt. I began as a predator and have always known this, in every sinew of my body and every synapse of my brain. I feel the excitement, the fear, the sharp concentration and flesh ripping success of the savannah, the pride, the sharing, my love of family and young. The savannah holds and informs me, accompanies me in my journey from the savannah into the world beyond. I trace my roots to the savannah. To know me, know that I begin as nomad, as hunter and gatherer, that I fashioned hand tools, ran hard and fast, lived life in the raw, protected the communal fire; that I have brought all of that with me, as I do the fear, the watchful eye, and the stalking skinny hunger. There is also peace on the savannah. The sun is warm. The water is plentiful. The soil is soft beneath my naked feet. My belly is full and my mind at rest.
How familiar that every time I ever try to speak about my origins I succumb to a demand that I find the time that preceded that time, and the time before that, and thus I find myself standing in blood, drawing on a cave wall with chewed twig ends and fingertips, speaking long heartfelt sentences well before the red paint dries. Crying. Chanting and moaning. Listening to the drumbeats as I draw the slayings on the wall. The hunt. The dead big creatures. I am proud of our kills, frustrated by my drawings. I want to show the smiles on the faces of my family and the full bellies of my children, but all I manage is the dead animal, its great heart, and our men with spears.
Which brings us, if you travel with me through time, to the twenty first century as measured by modern men and women, to the purchase of foods with no odor, food wrapped in plastic, boxed in cardboard, and sold in supermarkets where dull music is played, and where I pay for all of the goods and services which keep me and my family alive with little pieces of rectangular plastic. No spears.
Between my death on the savannah and this first newest breath of “my” life is a time inside of which was no time, no days, no light, no darkness, only time. And then a stirring in warm tasty seas, in a cocoon, as in the beginning, a sense of comfortable boundaries, of there being no boundaries, of all being one and one being all. I was happy there. Careless I think.