Birds of chains

We stride down streets of ambition, yet our feet remember the Savannah. Desert thorns, tenacious and sharp, cling to our heels, forcing us into wide, frantic leaps, long before evolution's slow hand can pluck them free.

First, the Gods, architects of life’s harmony, rose to reign. Later came humans, a curiosity. We tasted the forbidden fruit, or perhaps Prometheus gifted us stolen fire – either way, we were irrevocably altered.

Unlike the raven, the tiger, the spider, the whale, we are never sated. Driven by a restless hunger, we reshape the world, a landscape alien to our origins, a self-imposed exile. The crafts we build, meant to grant us meaning, often leave us adrift, lost on seas of our own making.

Perhaps, the bottomless hunger is universal. Just that in us, it found marriage with incredible skill. We build new structures upon ancient foundations, a city of steel and glass inhabited by citizens of the old world. We reshape the world faster than nature reshapes us.

This relentless innovation has remade our surroundings, but not our souls. The old Gods, dormant yet potent, linger in the chambers of our hearts, whispering of ancient commandments we no longer understand.

Exiled from Eden, we wander a self-made desert. Each day, a new skirmish erupts, a clash between ancient impulses and modern aspirations. What we crave, what we find alluring, are the edicts of those early Gods, born of Nature's cradle. We set our ships to sail, believing we command the winds, only to be caught in sudden storms of Poseidon, driven to unintended shores, sometimes even wrecked, sometimes finding wonder in certain places until we tire of them. The illusion of control, a fragile mast against the tides of our own making.

'We have slain the old Gods,' we proclaim loudly and confidently, 'We are free! We are people of liberty! No longer slaves to the old!' A hollow victory! The Gods, amused, watch us dance to their unseen strings.

This is our inheritance: to perpetually surge forward, only to find ourselves tethered by our own antiquity. Monkeys jump from tree to tree; we leap across epochs, incorrigible, yet with chains around our necks.

Our vaunted liberty… is it merely a gilded cage, concealing capabilities and drives forged beneath a harsher sky? Our modern discontent is a phantom limb, an ache from a time of scarcity, when Saturn reigned, before Jupiter’s dawn. Yet, we bolt it as horses unto our chariots and race forward.

And so, we remain: children of the past, still governed by the old Gods, even as we sculpt the world to our restless designs in a dangerous, incurable love to unintended consequences.