That small blue-green planet
Ivo loved the earth in that incomprehensible way few people can, loved it as a mother loves her child. He was intimately connected to it, inextricably part of its complex processes. He understood its seemingly chaotic changes and welcomed its harshness as readily as its perfect symmetry. He was as at home on the arctic ice sheets as the city streets, the desert and the mountains, the ocean and the air. He loved the busyness of mankind, delighted in its technological gains and stared with the fierce pride of awe before the very real potential destruction of an ice berg.
He wasn't a thrill seeker; he didn't crave danger the way some do. He accepted the possibility of accidents as a fact of life, his own demise being no more significant than a baby bird falling from its nest or a deer being trapped in a ravine by wild dogs. He didn't fear death, he saw it as part and parcel of life and he would no more curtail living to avoid it than the penguins would call off their annual march to nesting grounds. Were he to fall, others would simply pick up where he had left off and continue on the path of progress.
This way of viewing life was so wildly different from anything I had ever known. While Ivo regarded man as just another animal, I had been raised to think of the world as something that belonged to us, something there for the taking. And while I was far from religious in any sense of the word, I had never questioned the existence of God. To Ivo this was worse than illogical, it was a form of backward thinking that belonged in the Middle Ages with the classic writers I studied.
In spite of the vast divide in our outlooks, he loved and accepted me. For him it was enough that our paths had crossed and that we were thrown together. It wasn't "fate" or some higher hand at work, he told me. It was just something random that happened the way random things always happen.
He then did something he had never done before, astonishing me in its simple intensity. He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it softly. "And I am so very grateful it did," he whispered.