Isn’t there a fourth island, one far removed from floating coconuts, water, weather, air, volcanoes, even perhaps space and time? An island of no known beginning or ending. And yet, at some point, an ‘island’ it did become. And at another point, palms appeared, and then those palms became self-aware.

And these palms, searching for meaning, for answers, for structure, envisioned that their beginnings were by the grace of powerful and unknowable gods, or by a single all-knowing God, or by happenstance, as built upon a pre-structured universe. All these ideas floated about on the intellectual winds of this island.

But there was another explanation as well. Because maybe…just maybe…it was all self-built.

Maybe they, the palms, the shrubs, the sand, the air, the sunrise, all of it, was NOT built, grown, structured, or formatted by outsiders, but rather was bootstrapped into existence by the island ‘itself’ and all that called it home. By this explanation, the palms, self-aware, were aware not of an island separate from themselves but of themselves.

All that they were aware of, was what they themselves were.

Thanks for the read!