Understand the Power
(The Universe is in your Hands edit)
Janet Kuypers
3/5/24
Humankind has a penchant for thinking the end is near.
Whether it be from a Bible telling of the Book of Revelations,
to mankind’s fault with our technology for the calendar change to 2000,
or the unimaginably different Aztec apocalyptic cataclysms...
—
We visited New York City when the millennium changed,
and saw that nothing fell apart.
We went to a members-only sportsman’s “club” for beers
on December 12th, 2012, to toast the Mayan prophecies
that never happened.
However, we all have something in common with every civilization —
some of us believe that the end is near —
whether it be from climate change, ice ages to droughts or floods,
or a crater smash, maybe a comet,
with an explosion raining ash down over civilization,
nearly extinguishing all life —
or whether we think our own mistakes will be our downfall,
from computers not understanding calendar changes
that make our technological world go black...
or else it’s just the right leaders
making just the wrong decisions
and starting mass nuclear annihilation,
destroying mankind, planet-wide.
So yeah, all of us have thought about it,
and all of us have tried to understand...
—
The disconcerting things are that the
Aztec culture (whose history is patchy,
after Spanish conquests destroyed them)
the frightening thing is that the Aztec
apocalypse story is so different
from all the others, because they believed
all that destruction... already happened.
—
This world is not the first, take it from the Aztecs
and their Calendar Sun Stone discovery, centuries-old,
a calendar used for astrology, chronology,
or even for the religious worship of their Sun God.
This discovery is one of the few things we revere
from a civilization that never passed the Stone Age,
but still knew of four “Suns”, eras, movements in history.
—
We may never have all the pieces
to fully understand the power
the Aztec civilization possessed
in truly understanding our world.
Now this Sun Stone,
which was first found laying horizontally,
is revered as “artwork” when viewed
on a wall, for aesthetic beauty only.
In doing this, we continue to fail to understand
what one society understood, revered and feared.
So with only parts of the pieces, shown incorrectly,
to help us fail to understand,
we continue to worry about the end,
how it may come, and,
without all the pieces together,
we still wonder
if we can truly be at peace at our end.
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