Time Capsule

Did you bury something in the earth or shoot your wishes into the sky with an arrow or speak to the stars hoping they would keep your words safe for someone far, far in the future to find?

Did you leave the key hidden under some ancient mat, trusting that someone would find it and unlock everything about you, your hopes, your dreams, your visions?

Did you account for the times in this history when the ability to read and write was lost for a century, or two, when only a person lost and with time on their hands could decipher your symbols? When chance stumbles against finding some distant Rosetta Stone with which to translate our guesses? Words with no retrievable sound.

All that is left of your box is your hope, that when opened it would speak some little truth of the past, that the papers and bits of plastic you saved would convey some greater truth, hints of gold in a manufactured world.

It used to be we would bury people with everything they would need in the next life (we think)- jewelry, food, and even our servants and horses and dogs. Or sometimes we would burn them, leaving nothing except ashes blowing in the wind, or throw them to the river. Sometimes we would preserve their bodies, hoping for resurrection.

What is more important, this time far in the future, or the now, the now that will allow some words you write to be spoken in the mouths of someone now, that spoken those words will live, how old is the oldest writing we know and how much older the words as they were spoken? How old is the oldest information we have lost because no one shaped it listened to it or practiced it?

How many languages are neither written, nor spoken, nor heard? How many objects have unknown uses? What of the recipe for celadon, what of the blue of the fringes of prayer shawls, what of the recipe for permanent pleats in silk, what of the tunes of the lyre? Find those keys, and use them if you can, in those days magic walked the earth, but it could not bind memory to an object, could not save knowledge or language. There was nothing to put in a time capsule.