Fresh Eyes

Catching up on some posts and reading; this one caught my eye.  I personally hold the mystery of life present alongside what I believe is a progressive evolution of life over time – an evolution that connects us to other living beings.

The writer in question describes the progression of the human form during gestation.  I thought it quite beautiful, and will quote here with the link (please visit to see the images):

Evolutionarily, to be human is ordinary and incredible. In eight weeks after fertilization, a single human embryo traces our entire evolutionary past. The first weeks we start simple, a sponge maybe, or the translucent ghost of a hydra. Within the next few days a notochord descends. The origin of the vertebrate. Gills streak our sides by week four, and we begin to breathe the amniotic fluid of our mother’s uterus like an ancient jawless fish. Week five, our hands web into the ray-like fin of a perch. Then a spine. A red lattice of veins. A mouth that sucks fluid into the soaked lungs of something amphibian. Week seven we sprout the first hair follicles of a mammal. Only in week eight are we human. We can never escape our ancestry because we play it back in ourselves. But with the same neurons that make a kingfisher dive or a deer start at the fall of a footstep he feels foreign, we can marvel as the whole living kingdom rises in a single human cell. We are not special because we can look down on other forms of life, but because we can see the connection. A deer looks into our eyes and sees a stranger. We look into the eyes of a deer and see ourselves. Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny Claire Filloux ’07 Department of Physics Princeton

Thank you, Ms. Filloux for such a captivating description.

I was a stranger in a strange land, as Leon Russell might sing it, but it wasn’t after all that strange.

This image (of the back of the airline seat) is from the back of the seat in front of me on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Entebbe, Uganda.  Wow.

Having grown up in the south of the United States as a white male, the signs that I was indeed THE foreigner were numerous:  I was among a handful of white people on the plane, and I’m pretty sure the only American.   For some, this may seem to be a shallow reflection on the situation, but for me it is one of the ways to really know you are in a new situation – I mean, a really new situation.   Not like discovering that the corner ice cream shop changed hands and is now a coffee house.

Why was I there, in the first place?  I was making a sort of pilgrimage.  More about that in a minute.

I’ll say this –  the people with Ethiopian Airlines were quite helpful.  My plane from Addis to Kigali was delayed because they discovered that the tires were showing too much wear.  It was one of those situations where you see people gesticulating and grumbling (in a number of languages), and wonder if they’d really rather take their chances rumbling down the runway at 150 mph on worn out rubber.

Anyway, I still remember the gate assistant who went out of her way to find out when the plane might leave and arrive in Kigali – I had people waiting for me there; people I had never met, yet felt like I knew well.  My phone battery was running out – I made one last call to let Mariette know I was delayed.

I wandered around the big “O” shape of the terminal, avoiding the smoking Chinese guys who puffed with the zeal of teens testing the bounds of freedom.  I got a coffee in a shop, having finally decided that caffeine would be better than beer at this stage of the game – having hardly slept at all from the time I started this trip at the snowy train station in Skövde, Sweden some 12 hours before.

Why am I here, of all places?  Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea…

(stay tuned)