Fifteen thousand generations ago our ancestors dreamt us, dreamt this unimaginable moment of the world, held the small seeds of us in the curved palms of their newly human hands and breathed on the possibility of who we would become.They sat in circles around fire, telling each other about their long descended children who would born in our time, and walk through the great peril of the planet to the other side.They could not picture us, so they covered the walls of their caves with the prints of their own hands.
Five thousand generations ago they began carving patterns into the shells of ostrich eggs and made words to teach their art.They left us messages about water and sky, earth and animals.Sucking on the marrows of roasted antelope bones, they spoke of us softly, remembering the distant future moment in which we are gathered in this ceremony. In which we speak of them, hold in our curved palms the gift of their dreams and seeds and fires, from which we have come, step by step across the years.We are the fulfilment of those ancient dreams, they tell us. We are enough.
And we who are gathered now, today, are the ancestors of dreams that others will fulfill.Children so distantly unborn that we cannot imagine their faces turn toward us as to an ancient fire. We offer them our love and trouble, our hopes and fears, everything we have gathered, everything we know, these ritual words in languages that will have vanished, and we tell them, all that we are, we give to you, for the world you will be making, for the great mending that will be your inheritance. For you we have labored, for you we have fought and planted. For you we sing. With our breath we bless the seeds of that livable future we conjure for them, and tell them, across the uncountable years, you are all that we hoped you would be. We are proud of your unimaginable becoming. You are enough.
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