When people are surrounded
by artificial light, by heat, and by order
it can be hard to imagine what it was like
for the first generation of human explorers,
who originally began as one diverse group,
who then went their separate ways
to discover and to understand more
about what and who makes the world
the way that it is, as well as populate
the vastly different regions that
our planet is known for the have to be
adapted to living in in many different ways.

The first people didn’t have clothes…
the first people didn’t have maps…
the first people didn’t even have
wooden built houses to call homes…
the first people didn’t even have maths –
but what the first people had,
and what sustained them,
were dreams, inspiration, ideas,
and from the moment that they harnessed
to ability to willingly create fire
they gave themselves the gift to be able
to see and to travel during the night,
to cook their own meals, and to be entranced
by the dancing flames of glowing light.

The first men and women who
embarked upon their journey of fate
to go to places they knew not where
saw things that they could only
conceptualise by capturing their depictions
of them in cave paintings and in legends
that have endured for thousands of years.

The first of us were the first to feel the spark of love…
they were the first of us to feel the passion of life…
they were the first of us to look up at the sky
and wonder about our place in the cosmos,
surrounded by an infinite number of stars,
and question why any of us are here…
they were the first of us to be brave enough
to bring people together to create
entire civilizations who thrived for a time
and who had to go through
more than anybody alive today could ever imagine.

We who are alive today are
who we are, with what we have,
because our ancestors were more
than even they knew that they were at the time –
but one thing that our ancestors knew well
was that in life what everybody
and what everything sometimes needs
more than anything is each other,
and also the knowledge that by
working together anybody can
get through anything, even the tough stuff.