I AM EARTH. I WILL BE OK.

I'll miss humans but it was barely the blink of an eye.

Well, it started out rough.

Darkness, stillness, silence. Then, from nowhere, energy.

The brightness, the sound, the shock of the speed of light.

Eventually, eternity and infinity slipped away. And that was when I met Father Time.

A good mentor, his first lesson was to comprehend a billion years. After a dozen came and went, calm and quiet again. I settled down. Fear of the void was replaced with focus on my sun. I was gravity.

When I was ready for her, Mother Nature came to me. She brought me biology and she said this is going to be amazing. She taught me that Father Time had more mad skills to help us enjoy her gift.

Smaller slices of time started to matter. A hundred million years at a time was where we began. Mother Nature’s closeness to Father Time brought the miracle of evolution. Exciting, weird – slow compared to light, but crazy quick to change. Just five slices of new time for cells to become animals.

Mother Nature showed me that I was a special rock. Magma, fissures, temperature, weather, meteorites, minerals, and the miracle of water! She could not do biology without me and so she named me Earth.

We got better at evolution. We grew braver. Mother Nature evolved a species that would be capable of consciousness. Our gift to ourselves was the creation of something that could do more than live among us, it could comprehend us. We loved it, we nurtured it, we saved it a few times. Incredibly, we were now carving out time in blocks of just ten thousand years.

We named it Human.

The three of us - Time, Nature and Earth – were in awe. Humans used consciousness to comprehend us. They invented language and music to express us. They grasped the value of belonging to Earth. Consciousness grew into reverence. Awareness of life and death humbled us all.

Father Time shared his greatest wisdom yet. Time, he showed us, is not lines going off in all directions, time is circles that keep folding back into themselves.

Humans grasped time microscopically. We could work with that. When time is a circle, every size works simultaneously.

And then it went bad.

Three hundred thousand beautiful years nurturing humans. Then just five thousand years sent humans toward self-immolation.

Father Time and Mother Nature never saw it coming. It made me sad but what could I do?

Humans stopped thinking that they belonged to Earth and instead, they became certain that Earth belonged them. Humans invented an all-powerful being that was bigger than Time and Nature and Earth. It’s hard to explain, but they came to deeply believe in a holy trinity that was not eternity, infinity and energy. Instead, from out of the depths of their own minds, they evolved gods into God.

Their God told them to behave as if all of creation was for them. God even told them that some Humans were better than other Humans because they comprehended “Him” the best.

Hell came in the form of arrogance. Humans deeply believed that their all-powerful creator of everything looked like themselves.

Incomprehensible. Serendipity sacrificed for selfishness.

That’s not how it ends. Time accelerated again. 300,000 years of tranquility and growth. 5000 years of God. Then 150 years of industry. Now the end is grasped. Humans even call it the End of Days.

Consciousness turns out to be something different than intelligence. Humans have created something in my honor, I suppose, they call it Earth Day. Humans talk about saving me. Apparently, I am having a climate crisis now and they want to fix me.

Neither Time, or Nature, or Earth can save the Humans now. We learned to be quick, but we are not that quick.

Humans will be gone of their own doing. Eternity, infinity, energy, gravity and biology will all move on.

We will miss them, but it was barely the blink of an eye.

I am Earth. I will be OK.