It must have started with an idea. No consultant’s study, no machinery, no feasibility analysis, no fiscal impact study. Just a pure, raw idea. Whether he used blueprints or not, I don’t know. Whether this was the best of three options eludes me. But somehow, somewhere, someplace he set his idea into motion.

He started with some substance from somewhere (did he make the substance?) and fashioned it into a giant ball. It was a big ball. Very big. He suspended it on nothing and told it to stay there. It did (don’t ask me how). Then he set it on fire. A very hot fire that generated its own fuel. It burned at 10,000 degrees F. on the surface.

Then he formed another smaller ball and placed it about 93 million miles from the larger, such that it stayed within a particular temperature range. He tilted the smaller one 23.4 degrees away from perpendicular and sent it spinning 1,674 mph at its largest diameter so it turned around completely every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds. He then sent the smaller around the larger ball such that every 365.242199 days it went completely around it. On the surface of this tilted, spinning, revolving ball he covered with, among other things, a substance made up of minerals, gases, liquid and organic matter. Above the surface of this ball he blanketed with gases that absorbed ultraviolet solar radiation but retained heat. These gases also had the capability of picking up liquids from the face of the ball, transporting them to another area and dropping them in small droplets. Moreover, this ball somehow held all this to itself, such that these droplets fell toward its surface and not away from it.

These substances, forces, distances and movements combined and worked in such a way that on May 6, 2013, on the continent of North America in a state called Virginia at its southeastern edge at 2 p.m. there was light, the air temperature was 75 degrees, the soil temperature 65 degrees at 4-inch depth and a liquid from the sky had just been released the day before.

Me? All I did was put the seed in the ground.