Reflections
The living past
Paul Marshall on the written record, older ways of observing the world, and the history that remains within us.
I am a writer and artist, my book Harmonic Being: An Introspective Journey is a reflection of what remains.
Writing is roughly 5,000 years old, first appearing with Sumerian cuneiform around 3200 BCE. Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years. That puts the written record at less than 2% of our species’ timeline.
The ancient world did not end. It lives in our body, in the water, in the wind and the earth, there’s a code in our shared breath, in patterns we repeat without knowing their origin. The Sumerians mapped the sky and called it order. The builders of sacred geometry drew shapes still found in cells, in shells, in the spiral of a fern. These were observations, made by people who paid closer attention than we do now.
We have not lost this. We have buried it under modern day.
History is not behind us. It is within us. The task is to recognise it in the present, and use it.
