On being Human

Saturday was Earth Day, and the March for Science in DC. As someone for whom science is basically a religion, I naturally had to attend.

I woke up that morning feeling absolutely electric. I had dreamed of being at the Cliffs, and–upon exiting the forest onto the beach–finding a flawless Megalodon tooth the size of my palm resting atop the sand, as if waiting for me to find it. I took this to be a message from my most ancient ancestors, particularly Ancestor Megalodon, who seems to speak for all of them these days: We are with you; go with our blessing.

Fire and Water: Offering to my Ancient Ancestors

I’m doing some spring cleaning in my room today, and part of that cleaning involves turning my nightstand into an actual, proper, official shrine to my evolutionary ancestors. While working on it, I got to thinking about how I was going to set up and “use” this shrine, which of course means thinking about how I was going to make offerings to these ancestors.

In many traditions, part and parcel of ancestor veneration is making offerings to the spirits of the ancestors being honored. The types of offerings made vary from culture to culture, with some offering food and drink items (such as in Korean jesa ceremonies or the Mexican Día de los Muertos) to the spirits of those gone before, and others offering physical objects (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial comes to mind).

Obviously, as we are humans honoring humans there, it’s easy to know what to offer: human things. We offer those ancestors human foods they might have enjoyed, human drinks they might be missing, human possessions that might have great meaning to them. In this way, we show them that they are not forgotten, that we love them, and that we want them to be happy.

My path involves honoring some very non-human spirits, and this is why I want to really think about what I’m trying to do here.

Back to the Cliffs

It took me hell to get there (namely working eleven days in a row with my hours adjusted so that I never went over 40 hours in a week–so all those days of work for regular pay), but I was finally given a day off to return to the Cliffs I love so much.

The sight of the water as I stepped off the wooded trail nearly had me crying.

Calvert Cliffs State Park is located in Lusby, MD and is home to part of the Calvert formation, an Early to Mid Miocene fossil deposit. The clay-based cliffs are in a constant state of erosion, and give up new treasures to the tides and beach every day. Though CCSP boasts its wealth of fossilized shark teeth, I’ve also found seashell imprint fossils, fragments of Echphora gardnerae (the state fossil of Maryland), porpoise and alligator teeth, gar scales, and once a near-perfect porpoise vertebra.

Now that I have more “officially” started down this path of venerating my evolutionary ancestors, this trip to the Cliffs felt almost like a kind of pilgrimage–for it was here on this very beach that my love and awe for my most ancient ancestors was first truly sparked.