They never told me just what to write, only to "keep track". I often wonder if to some that meant keeping only dates of births and deaths, of landmarks, successes and failures along the road, like the cover of a Bible on a shelf. To others, I imagine it meant to record the minutes as if in a corporate meeting, so that all moments be not lost, all conversations searchable later, and nothing forgotten.

I myself "keep track" simply by this, committing my inner thoughts and observations to paper, for so long as such parchment survives in this world.

I write with no expectation that my words should last "forever", though I believe some I travel with assume falsely that they will. Has this lesson in our smallness, our insignificance, gone unlearned to many even still? That nothing we as "humans" do will ever remain for eternity, except perhaps our own inner evolutions, as that is probably the only thing we can truly pass down through our generations of procreation, an evolution of creation.

Perhaps we now move on so slowly, so consistently, so sorrowfully yet hopefully onward, to a new creation. Perhaps these words really could survive at least long enough to remind us, once in our new home somewhere, how far we have come, what we have fought and defeated, and how even just a few of us remaining continues our whole species to continue to survive. Perhaps our evolution could not continue in the situation we had put ourselves in for so very long. Has history not taught that one must die to be reborn? And that this 'death' is not always the impending fearful end of our lives that we may think it is?

We have all died now. In one way or another. The death of 'normalcy'. The death of all we knew to be true for so very long. The death of our way of life, until recently. The death of loved ones, of routine, of government, of security, of stability. The death of what were our homes, up there in the now snow-covered north. Even the death of the weather and nature's patterns we thought we could so easily predict with our 'science'. Probably the same 'science' that messed it all up.

Now we walk and walk and walk. Like corpses suffering through the trials of the underworld, we walk. Onward, to our rebirths.