(First posted here.)

It’s not like we give them names. If anything, it is these creatures that gave us—whatever it is you would like to call us—the power to rule their lives.

To Dante we are the kagluyag, but to you, sentient beings as weak-willed as the rest of the putrid, cake-y, unthinking masses, you know us by several other names.

The first thought appeared without the hooting fanfare of centuries standing in ovation. It slithered through what is not exactly nothing but what is not yet—the suspended animation of a universe in waiting. It spun unto itself, in the silent implosion of famous elements: something, someone, snapped to life. And then there is this: the world as we know it.

Rules too complex to document determine the parameters of life-creation, of thought-creation, of freedom-conjuring. Here, the microscopic, telescopic difference between a cactus plant and a raging dinosaur. Here, the indescribable nuances that make a giant sequoia a giant sequoia, the same but different nuances that make a black bear sing to its cubs like they were little purple flowers just beginning to taste the sun. Here, the singular particles that dance between states of matter: molten lava, glacial ice, the sulfuric fumes of legendary geysers.

We know these rules. We breathe these rules. We are not the same.