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What Impermanence, Legacy and Creativity. It’s in Our Nature.
We Want to Create Legacy…
We were at an ethnography and anthropology museum over the weekend, looking into the far past of human history.
One of the temporary exhibitions was on impermanence (yep, ironic, right!), with a large sand mandala at the entrance, a mandala which will most likely be gone by the time you read this post.
I was struck by the juxtaposition of this exhibition on the lower floor of the museum with a display of skulls from some of our distant human ancestors, millions of years old, some of them millions of separate pieces of bone, painstakingly put together and then created as an imagined form of the living being.
Impermanence and recreation, back to back.
To find and preserve remains from millions of years ago, to spend months and years of work on them, creates a natural desire to want to keep them, to protect them from harm, to preserve for our generation and the generations to come.
Preserved so we can marvel at them, understand more about where we’ve come from and imagine what life might have been like for those animals, a distant cousin perhaps, or a branch of the species that died out somewhere along the way.
