And if we are
James B. Nicola
And if we are but a collective hunch the only fundamentalist is Science. I just drank my coffee. Before that I put some milk in it. So now I am all who I was before I drank my coffee with milk in it plus that coffee and that milk. One hour ago, part of me was in a carton in the refrigerator. Another part was waiting to be ground. Last week I sat in the grocery store. The day before that I rode on a truck. Last season I was sweating on a bush in Brazil till I was picked with other black beans—you always knew I was part black—or settling in a cow on an upstate farm—you always knew I was part white. Before that I grew up out of the ground, green and fresh, yet so upright, waiting to be gnawed and chewed and digested a few times. Green, white, black, we’ve all been many colors. And before that I lay underground as grains of soil that fed the grass. At the very same time, I was floating in the sky before the rain when I fell to quench the soil that fed the grass that became the milk in the cow which I’ve now drunk in my coffee from Brazil. And I at last have become this me who will never be the one I was before I drank the coffee with milk from the bush in Brazil and the cow on the farm upstate. And, as I breathe, in a hundred years, a thousand, a hundred thousand, or a thousand thousand, whatever this might mean in thought and deed, I shall be everywhere, and everything, and everyone just like you again.