Expanding The Self as a Construct: Lava Rock Learning to Walk 🌋

Join me: I'm walking on some lava rock on a West Texas hike, with my newborn son Jack strapped onto my chest. With him pressed against me I can feel how we are parts of a much larger lineage—I find myself telling him that one day he’ll have kids, and then they’ll have kids, and he’ll be a grandpa just like grandpa Frank is to him. And now my self-sense starts to stretch. I’m tracing my ancestry backwards; now I’m feeling—from a zoomed out evolutionary view—how I’m less of an individual entity and more of a bead in the necklace of my ancestry collective. How far back do I trace my ancestry? How big is the boundary consciousness chooses in making sense of experience?

Grandparents came from monkeys that came from amoebas that came from half-living viruses that came from molecules bouncing around on cell-wall-like lava rock pockets under the ocean. Now “I am” includes that too, and I look as this whole evolutionary unfolding once more for my forebears to see the lava rock crunching underfoot as my ancestor, and bam! I come to realize that it took me 3.5 billion years but I’ve done it! I, lava rock, have learned to walk. And the I that is movement, nevermind this self-awareness, is the the whole process of creation from lava rock to human, and I am undeniably precious, astounding, and whole.

With love, Jordan