Saturday, November 6, 2010

The Real Legacy










I suppose it's the very essence of meditation draw unusual conclusions from seemingly unrelated things. Since I try to make photography something of a meditation, it hopefully answers the question "how did this guy make THIS connection?"


The bottle that was so carelessly discarded on this sea wall, projected me millions of years into the future, to a time when other species as evolved as we are looking at what we leave behind. Much the way that we are able to detect the footsteps of long extinct species, they too may find what we leave behind, and learn about us from the slight chemical variations the bottle's owner left before abandoning it here.


Without the least intending it, from the moment we are conceived we will leave a permanent scar on this planet, and to some degree the universe in general. Even the minuscule details will be recorded. Though our passing and the erosion of what we leave behind will appear to erase our existence, as shown by those life forms that have gone before us, we have only changed the way these inevitable processes take place.


Who will find us? If we acquire the evidence of a birds footsteps dating back millions of years, then surely a future intelligence will find the remains of a species as organized we are about storing those who have passed on. Yet, it really will be the little things we do that will be of the most interest. Piers like this will erode, our finest architecture and feats of engineering will fall into the sea or be the makeup of some future grand mountainscape. The DNA from the fingers and lips of a once thirsty individual will likely show a future intelligence who we were and what we were like. It is, our true legacy.

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