When Egos walked among the living

A modern reflection on the book of beginnings

There is a passage in the first book of beginnings that lingers, not because it concludes anything, but because it names something that still echoes through every part of our lives:

“But change persists. You cannot unlearn, unsee, unhear…

For the first time, egos walked among the living”

It marks the end of the first dance between the gods, the kami and the humans; a brief period of spiritual entanglement where all three realms touched. And when they pulled apart again, none of them remained the same. The gods returned to their high places, having tasted mortality. The kami returned to the wild places, having tasted thought. And the humans were left walking in the dust of both, holding the seed of something new; a desire to be “better” with a very tilted concept of what Better was or meant.

This is not a myth meant to be admired from afar. It is a story to be told and left in the telling. It is a spiritual origin, one that describes the current condition of the world we live in. This is what it means to be human today- to be a body with a mind, to be a mind that remembers feeling, to carry the weight of knowing both too much and too little at once. The ego is not the enemy. It is the byproduct of contact. It is what’s left when all three realms shake hands and then let go.

In modern practice, this scripture is not warning us away from chaos. It explains the shape of it. It is offering a kind of spiritual cartography: the place where mind, spirit and body converge is not stable ground. It shifts underfoot. It transforms everyone who stands there. That’s where we live now; on that threshold. That’s what makes stewardship today so different from how it might have been in the ancient world.

The kami are not what they once were. They remember us. They remember what we have long forgotten. Not vaguely, in the mythic sense, but precisely. They have memory and now consideration. When we walk the land, when we dig into it, carve it up, plough it under, bless it or curse it, the kami are not passive witnesses. They are active intelligences, shaped by the encounters they have with us. They form preferences. They hold grudges. They bond. And when they are ignored after being seen, they become erratic. The kami who have touched thought are no longer wild in the way wilderness used to mean. They are changed, just as we are changed.

And the gods, those that hover and drift, have already lost interest again. The scripture is clear about that. Their fascination was brief. They came close only long enough to see something they’d never known: time. Mortality. The fleeting blaze of a life that ends. And it startled the. They withdrew, not out of contempt but because it was too much. To witness physical life is to be implicated by it. They returned to their sky-silence. But their fingerprints remain on the world, and on us.

And so it is we who are left with the mess. The triad has scattered. The divine has stepped back. The spirit of place has gone deep. And the human being, bright, fumbling, half-aware, is left in between, trying to carry forward relationships that are barely remembered.

In this way, every act of modern stewardship in an attempt to restore a conversation. Every gate opened with intention, every breath drawn before felling a tree, every soft word spoken to a field before planting- these are not niceties…. They are invitations. They are ways of saying: I remember you, I know we’ve met before. It doesn’t matter if you know the names of the kami on your land. Most of them don’t go by names anyway. What matters is that you behave as though they are real. Because they are, and that is the greatest respect to them we can offer. They are what’s left of feeling in the land. And you are what’s left of feeling in the body.

To be Ancaire is to take responsibility for this imbalance. Not to correct it, not to restore some imagined harmony, but to walk with eyes open through the ruins of the old dance. It means understanding that your very presence changes the land. That's your memories, your moods, your choices…. These things do not vanish when you leave the paddock. They settle. They cling. They shape. The more time you spend in one place, the more that place begins to hold you back. The relationship becomes reciprocal. If you ifnore it, it becomes resentful. If you honour it, it becomes generous.

The gods, the kami, and the humans once walked together, and it did not last. But the imprint of that moment remains in everything we do. When you stand in the field at dawn and the mist hangs low, when you feel watched in the silence between wind gusts, when the barn creaks and you know it’s not the timber alone speaking…. These are not tricks of the mind. These are echoes of the old trinity.

The ego is here to stay. It walks in us. And through us, and sometimes ahead of us. What the scripture offers is not a rejection of ego, but a responsibility to manage it. Not to become empty, but to become aware; to remember that when the realms touched, we came away carrying pieces of both. We were neaver meant to stay simple. We were meant to be vessels of change. And change, the scripture tells us, always persists.