Ubuntu

It was dark.

It was darkness like the kind that exists in deep underwater caves, below layers of noxious gases and under the awesome pressure of millennia. Velvety to the touch – until the hands that reach out, groping for a handhold, a foothold, anything – realize that what they are grasping is only air.

But in the midst of this deep, spacious blackness, a woman sits at a loom, and she holds in her hands the light of ages. Her loom is constructed of an earthy material – the same darkness that she is surrounded by, solidified. First she weaves in strands of the brightest turquoise, then a blue so dark it is almost unrecognizable. She pulls strings of verdant green, chartreuse, shades of white and brown and pink, a fiery orange-red, a deep, royal purple.

And when the strands are locked in place together, each color exudes its own aura of light, and they are blended together in a fascinating showcase of dancing rays – here is the formula for laughter, for melancholy, for violence, for tranquility. Here is Earth, here is humanity and what we have discovered, and here is also what lies in the unknown, Here are the animals, here are the insects, here are the grasses the whisper lightly in the breeze and the tree branches that bend and break in storms. Here are roiling clouds, clear skies, crashing surf, monolithic stones – here is everything that makes us who we are. Here is everything, and here are we.

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