"In a swirling spiral of gas, heat, and light, a tiny grain of dust that was Gaia's seed danced and swirled.  Throbbing and pulsing with an electric passion, she drew to her other grains, other seeds, until together they formed a ball, spinning and dancing in the lens of radiance that was to become the sun.  The dancers flung out their arms, swirled their skirts, bumped up against each other, and fused.  Growing larger and larger, spinning and dancing faster and faster, they were drawn toward each other by the passionate pull of gravity, at times colliding in a fiery death, at other times in a mating union, until at last the planets congealed into their orbits, circling a fiery sun.

Gaia was hot, her surface erupting in plumes and rivers of fire, her face bombarded by missiles or rock that left her pockmarked with craters and seeded with ice and the chemical prototypes of life.  Slowly, slowly, she cooled down.  On her surface, packets of energy frozen into form combined and recombined.  Ice melted to primordial seas that washed a rocky shore.  Lightning struck.  Waves rolled to shore and retreated; the soup of energy was boiled and cooled, dried and immersed, again and again.  Bubbles formed thin skins that enclosed crystalline strands of frozen energy, organized in a radically new way: a way that conveyed information, that communicated instructions for reproducing itself.  The double helix of DNA was life's first great creative leap, the one that allowed all others to follow.  Life was born.

The Gift of the Ancestors

Life on earth was still relatively new.  At first, simple, one-celled beings filled the seas, living by changing the energy patterns around them, breaking down large molecules - complex clumps of dancing energy and form - into smaller clumps, using the energy released to move and dance.  They filled the seas in promiscuous abundance, constantly exchanging bits of DNA, sidling up to one another and crooning the bacterial equivalent of "Hey, hey hey, baby ... the thought of trading genes with you drives me c-crazy!"  They formed one life-whole, one global gene pool, one planetary well of information and experimentation.

But after a time, life reached a crisis point.  Life began to run out of food.  There weren't enough of those complex molecules for all of life to continue, and life began to starve and die.

Yet life has always been inventive, creative.  Those simple, one-celled beings were already experimenting with different forms.  Some were long and skinny and wriggled and swam.  Some were round and fat.  Some adapted to hot and some to cold.  And always they were trading genes, shifting forms, changing and transforming.  At that time, there wasn't yet a brain on the planet, yet life came up with something so brilliant, so amazing, that it transformed the whole nature of existence and the atmosphere itself.

Life invented a mandala.  A beautiful molecule, like a patterned flower, with a magic quality.  For when a photon of sunlight struck the heart of this pattern, it began to vibrate and shiver and set off a chain of reactions that harvested the sun's energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into food.  Chlorophyll and the process of photosynthesis were life's next great invention, and the green things, the sunlight-harvesters, were born.

Green things filled the seas and the crevices of the shores, flung a smear of filmy life over rock and sand.  Life flourished as never before.

But there was one problem.  The miraculous process that used sunlight to make food gave off a waste product, a toxic gas that burned and destroyed everything it touched.  And as life grew, over hundreds of millions, a billion, then two billion years, the very air became polluted by this gas, so that life could no longer avoid its touch of death.

But life continued to experiment and invent.  Some of those tiny creatures dug down in the mud to avoid the toxic gas.  Some clumped together for protection.

And some discovered another miracle: that by reversing one of the moves in the dance of photosynthesis, a new process could be born - one that could take the toxic gas, which we call oxygen, and use it to burn food and make energy.

And so the breathers were born, those who dine on the sunlight-harvesters, burning their bodies as fuel for life.  In burning food, the breathers give off carbon dioxide, which the green things (with the help of the sun) transform to food again.  And the green things give off oxygen, which the breathers use in burning food.  Gaia began to breathe, passing her breath back and form from red to green, continuing to build up oxygen, to transform herself.

And after millions of years, the breathers took the mandala of chlorophyll, switched the atom at its heart to iron, and formed the hemoglobin that swims in the cells of our red blood.

And so the cycle is complete, and the earth breathes in and out, red to green to red.

And this air we breathe is a gift of the early ancestors.  With each breath in, we take in the results of their great creativity.  With each breath out, we give back."