As the sun went higher, the color faded and the earth gave way to nothingness, as though the color were a trick, as if the sun were teaching us there is no such thing as beauty, only what it chooses to shine a certain light upon that stimulates a certain chemical in our brains, as though the two were old lovers, teasing each other, reliving some forgotten memory.
But if they were teasing each other, they have certainly stopped. What we have here in all this dead dirt is the stuff of life without life's spark. All of us are made from this stuff, this dirt. Everything in life is just this magical soil, fairy dust, if you will. Plant a seed in the soil and that seed will find the magic around it to make some sprig of wood that, with time from the fairy dust around it, will make a tree, and with the aid of water and more dirt and a hundred years, a tree the height of a skyscraper and the width of a house. All of it from dirt. Grass grows the same way, carrots, potatoes, onions, apples on trees, barely for beer. Rocks are dirt fired in the furnace of the earth's belly, steel is processed rocks, diamonds are rocks forged in the compression of earth's weight, and people, you and I, are dirt lit with, depending on what you believe, the magic seed of the aliens, or the accidental nothingness of Darwin's dreams, or the warm breath of God, the spark of life, giving an embryo a heartbeat, the magical glint that brings the dirt alive, sets in its DNA a coded direction and a mysterious motion that becomes greater than a tree in complexity, able to question its own being, able to guess at its creation, able to love and to hate, to live inspired, then to die, to return to dirt, to the vast abyss of nothing that is a desert in midday, a sea of brown, only beautiful when the sun tricks the eye, only beautiful in the playful metaphor of light.
-Through Painted Deserts, Chapter 6 Trouble by Donald Miller
Echosmith - Cool Kids
But if they were teasing each other, they have certainly stopped. What we have here in all this dead dirt is the stuff of life without life's spark. All of us are made from this stuff, this dirt. Everything in life is just this magical soil, fairy dust, if you will. Plant a seed in the soil and that seed will find the magic around it to make some sprig of wood that, with time from the fairy dust around it, will make a tree, and with the aid of water and more dirt and a hundred years, a tree the height of a skyscraper and the width of a house. All of it from dirt. Grass grows the same way, carrots, potatoes, onions, apples on trees, barely for beer. Rocks are dirt fired in the furnace of the earth's belly, steel is processed rocks, diamonds are rocks forged in the compression of earth's weight, and people, you and I, are dirt lit with, depending on what you believe, the magic seed of the aliens, or the accidental nothingness of Darwin's dreams, or the warm breath of God, the spark of life, giving an embryo a heartbeat, the magical glint that brings the dirt alive, sets in its DNA a coded direction and a mysterious motion that becomes greater than a tree in complexity, able to question its own being, able to guess at its creation, able to love and to hate, to live inspired, then to die, to return to dirt, to the vast abyss of nothing that is a desert in midday, a sea of brown, only beautiful when the sun tricks the eye, only beautiful in the playful metaphor of light.
-Through Painted Deserts, Chapter 6 Trouble by Donald Miller
Echosmith - Cool Kids