The Book of Ǵenh: Reimagining our Origin Story for a Life-Centric Reorientation
I’m in the process of relocating all my writing, currently scattered across many disorganized platforms, onto Substack. This one was hiding somewhere behind a Medium paywall, and I wanted to bring it back to life. Hope you enjoy.
Ǵenh’s blistered feet held her captive until well after sundown. When the cracked dirt cooled to a bearable simmer, she hobbled into the night to rest in the roots of a desiccated tree stump. This is where she wanted to die, at the foot of the stars.
She had lost interest in the tasteless preserves in the storeroom, and her well had run dry a couple days ago. All her precious plants had withered in the heat, and rain, even the hope for it, had abandoned her months ago. In the early days, she thought about leaving, but she knew there was nowhere else to go — it was the same everywhere. Her heart ached louder than her stomach. She longed for a home she never left but could never go back to.
A shooting star creased the sky but she couldn’t spare the tears she felt in her tightening chest. It was a tantalizing affair to gaze upon the night sky. She envied the creatures who couldn’t comprehend the stars, who couldn’t suffer from their unanswerable invitation. She felt a cutting ache that refused to numb. Her once vibrant planet was doomed to wink out in the night, never seen, never known.
As an inheritor of Life, she felt a guardian to it. Not in the way the elite sought to protect their individual lives in doomed, unready fantasies of spaceships and bunkers, but like a mother, heart clasped but bursting for the life around her, to succeed, to thrive…
There was no Life left here for her to protect. Her hope lay squarely in the stars. All she had left was the hope that her Seeds would catch root in one of those glimmering homes in the vast darkness of space. That a distant star might warm the face of some future, unimaginable guardian of Life was all she clung to now.
By then, the Seeds were almost half way out of the solar system, but it would be many millennia before they reached their targets. Years ago, when planetary collapse seemed inevitable, her team launched their planet’s hardiest organisms toward young solar systems, hoping to give them as much time as possible.
Nestled into her tree, she worried for her microscopic astronauts. She wondered if they had a chance. Allowing herself a shred of hope, she wondered what types of lifeforms they’d beget, and if they’d make the same mistakes. She wished she could have sent a message along with those hardy voyagers, but Life itself would have to be her message. Cherish it. Protect it. It’s you against the night now. As she felt the last of her strength siphoning out into the night sky, she willed her spirit to the stars to ride along with her Seeds. Let them remember us. A story they couldn’t possibly know, but can’t afford to forget.
Millions of years after Ǵenh’s death, her Seeds found a home in a young ocean planet in a newly formed solar system…
Five billion years ago, a cloud of hydrogen, helium, and the dust of exploded stars collected into a giant cloud that would give birth to our solar system. The center of this cloud collapsed in on itself to create our sun while gravity, that mysterious diety of longing, pulled rocks and dust into a disc around our infant star. As the particles in the disk spiraled around the sun they consolidated into hundreds of planets of which an early Earth was only one. As this proto-Earth still roiled and bubbled from the heat of millions of collisions, another planet, Theia, about the size of Mars, collided into Earth. Their fateful fusion liquified the two planets into one and spewed massive chunks of Earth to the sky. Those chunks, trapped in a ring by Earth’s gravity, eventually coalesced into our moon.
As Earth cooled, water vapor rose from the molten depths of the planet and rained back down to the earth in an endless biblical downpour. Perhaps at the same time, as another theory suggests, water-laden icy meteors bombarded Earth for millions of years, slowly turning Earth into an ocean-planet with only scattered islands dotting its blue surface.
It was soon after this that life was created through a process called abiogenesis: life was born (genesis) from non-life (a-bio)… or so the story goes.
Many of us were taught this particular genesis story in high-school as explained through the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1952, the theorized conditions of early Earth were recreated in a sterilized, boiling flask. The primordial mixture was repeatedly shocked with simulated lightning, and in the process, simple building blocks of life were formed. Through these types of experiments, a self-replicating entity has never been generated. Still, scientists generally favor this theory that life on Earth emerged gradually from increasingly complex inorganic molecules.
And so, the mythology we grew up on was the story that life arose from non-life when a lightning bolt (the literal metaphor of random chance) struck a bowl of hot soup. If we crawled out of lightning soup, so be it, but the truth is the exact origin of life on Earth is still a mystery. Some find it rather miraculous that life had time to spontaneously generate so immediately after Earth’s oceans had formed.
The story of Ǵenh is a different story of how life came to Earth. Early microbes sent here by an intelligent being is a theory scientists such as Carl Sagan and Watson Crick called directed panspermia, a name I find wholly incompatible with the enchantment it offers. Shall we call it Space Sowing, with perhaps an appropriate nod to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower? Either way, it all sounds rather science fiction, I know, but without further evidence, explanations of the origin of life on Earth is an act of part science, part mythology.
If origin stories help us orient ourselves to the world, what lesson does life arising from an accidental lab experiment have to teach us? To be human is to attempt to make sense of the world, but when chaos is your root and point of orientation, no clear direction emerges. History has shown us that origin stories deeply affect our search for purpose and how we behave on this Earth. In the face of climate change, the importance of origin stories has never been more pronounced.
The Judeo-Christian faith places our origin in the whim of a deity on the sixth day of a week-long universe-creating effort.
“So God created mankind in his own image…And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”” — Genesis 1:28, ESV: Bible
In this story, humans found their first home in Eden, but Eden does not represent our Earth. The Earth we know is the wilderness humans were banished to for breaking the laws of paradise. In Thomas Cole’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, you can just make out the naked figures scorned and disgraced, cowering away from the light of paradise toward the gloomy and hostile Earth we call home. These early stories informed a culture’s relationship with wilderness as a place of banishment and God’s words a decree to subdue it.
After the expulsion, Adam and Eve arrived in an inhospitable wilderness, and life became a game played to earn a place back in paradise. As 17th century writer Sir Thomas Browne observed, “for heaven made all life just a stopping point on the way to home,” and if happiness in the afterlife could be assured, he surmised, certain believers would not even bother with this world, for it was “only a martyrdom to live.”
Unlike the lightning-soup origin story, there is no doubt this mythology has a clear purpose to instill. Your work here on Earth is to make it to heaven (God and your pastor make the rules). The wilderness that plagues our planet is something to be feared, conquered, endured, and the ultimate goal is to find grace in spite of the depravity on Earth. It’s no feat to imagine what this orientation toward Earth would wrought, you only need look around.
Across the Atlantic, a different origin story blossomed with a very different moral. The indigenous peoples of the Anishinaabe grew up learning of Skywoman who, in the beginning, fell toward Earth from Skyworld. When Skywoman fell to Earth, geese braced her fall, a great turtle offered his shell as sturdy ground, and Muskrat sacrificed his life to bring her mud from the bottom of the ocean. Moved by the generosity of the animals, Skywoman sang and danced in thanksgiving. Through her movements, the gifts of the animals, and her deep gratitude, her handful of mud grew and multiplied into Earth as we know it, a land they call Turtle Island.
In this origin story, the first acts of humanity were borne out of gratitude. This story helps the Anishinaabe child understand Earth as a blessing offered to us through the grace of our older siblings, the animals and spirits of the land. It is thus our job here on Earth to reciprocate the gifts that have been given to us. Compare this to Adam and Eve. In both cases origin stories shape worldview, but for the Anishinaabe life is to be grateful, for the Christian faith, life is to be overcome, subdued.
What about the origin story we learned in school? What moral is there to learn? Science attempts to be morally neutral, but that doesn’t stop humans from developing a moral anyway. The only conclusion on-hand seems to be that life is to be bewildered. Which would not be so bad if we could train our bewilderment to slip into awe more frequently than it slips into nihilism. Sadly, that rarely seems to be the case.
What if we had grown up with the origin story of Ǵenh? What culture would we create if we saw Earth as a miraculous celestial garden bed that seeds scattered to the cosmic winds found, against all odds, a home in?
We might start to wonder what kind of garden it is we’ve landed on. We might internalize how miraculous it is that a planet, so perfectly outfitted for life, received a seed. For what science can tell, Earth appears to be extremely special in its ability to foster life. For instance, Earth is protected from radiation by the powerful magnetic field created by Earth’s solid inner core spinning in its metal outer core. That same movement of Earth’s core causes tectonic shifts that drag materials into the mantle and periodically reintroduce them to the surface. Such a long-scale nutrient cycle might have been critical to sustaining life.
Our unusually large moon creates dramatic tides that help transport heat from the equator to the poles. This energetic tug and pull has played a crucial role to life throughout Earth’s history. Meanwhile, the chance impact of Theia is responsible for the length of our nights (short enough for photosynthesis) and tilt (deterring the extremity of our seasons). As if none of this were enough, only 10% of solar systems have planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn. If it weren’t for their massive gravity pulls, which act as asteroid sinks, mass extinction events from meteor impacts may have happened too frequently for conscious life to evolve. Each of these and many more particularities of Earth underscore the rarity and extreme precocity of life on Earth. Life on Earth is a feat of perseverance, of attrition, of miraculous luck, and through Ǵenh, a feat of hope.
While Space Sowing is a valid hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth, it doesn’t need to be true to help explain what life on this planet is like. What it is like to be dumbstruck on a floating rock with no sign of life anywhere else in an incomprehensibly vast universe. It is like our microbial ancestors were sent here in a capsule as a last act of hope. It is just us against the night. The story doesn’t need to be true for it to shape our orientation to the world. Stories are a way of making sense of how things are, by telling a simplified version of what they’re like.
The power in the story of Ǵenh is less in re-imaging where we come from, and more in what it says about which direction we might choose to head. If we are merely seeds planted in an unlikely bed of soil wondering if we will flower, we see there is no guarantee for us, no space gardener, “no hint that help will come from elsewhere”. Whether we thrive or die in our pot of soil will be determined by our ability to accept the responsibility of this position. As the newest Inheritors of Life.
That should give our striving purpose. If we no longer take this world for granted — if we can shake this silly suspicion that Earth was made for us and see that we are instead the most fortunate shipwrecked crew on a mysterious, benevolent island we can start to grasp the precarious and precious nature of our existence. It’s not incorrect to see life on Earth as a miracle. To see Life itself as a miracle. It is up to us if we will heed the last hope of Ǵenh whispered on the winds of space.
thankful you found this, I daresay perfect timing