Five miles meandering with mazy motion, Through dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank the tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!
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The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.
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We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.
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Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
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It is as queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains.
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He's happy who, far away from business, like the races of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay.
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All I'm trying to do is not join my ancestral spirits just yet.
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