The story you are about to hear is true. Well, let’s say it’s true-ish. You know, like Hamilton. 

It certainly is big. In fact, it’s vast. Like a lot of stories, it starts at the beginning. However, this story ends in the future. You might even say it ends beyond the future. 

It’s about a rock and an ax carefully shaped from that rock. A “simple” tool small enough to hold in your hand. A tool that makes it easier to do things. To cut things. To make things. To build things. Things like a meal, or a living, or a community, or a society. Also, things beyond things. Like caring, and loving, and compassion. Like everything. 

But hold on. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves. If we’re going to tell a big story with a little rock, we need, well, the rock. But we also need a sun, and a planet, and a solar system, and a galaxy, and a universe. We’ll need people, of course. But not quite yet. 

For now, let’s start at the beginning… 

1. Conceive 

Conceive is one of those interesting words that has two distinct meanings. And, for this first piece, Darien has taken full advantage of that fact. Like "The Big Bang", Conceive starts with nothing and ends with everything, including the Sun and the Earth, along with some rather interesting rocks the color of roses - before there were roses. 

2. Rockaxeon 

You might think of this as the overture to the opus. It’s actually more than that. For in this song, we hear about (and from) the ones who came before us - our ancestors. Known by many different names like Australopithecus, Heidelbergensis, and Homo erectus, they were not the same as us, but in some ways remarkably similar. Later, we’ll imagine those who are yet to come. 

3. Africa 

If there is a birthplace of life on Earth, it is Africa. Even in our modern world, it teems with life and calls to humans everywhere. It is here where the story of the Rose Quartz Ax begins. An ancestor discovers an amazing rock and creates a very special tool. Those priceless objects will accompany hundreds of generations of women and men over thousands and thousands of years as they wander to Europe and around the Earth. Including a very special place in Spain. 

4. The Center of Time 

This is where everyone and everything exists. Like those gone before us, and those left behind, we’re here in the Center of Time. During this song, early humans perform a ritual burial, honoring their dead, and providing evidence of compassion, by leaving behind a precious, rare, and ancient object: the Rose Quartz Ax. (Insider info: This song also marks the center of our opus.)

5. Atapuerca   

Cut to 1998 in the hills of Northern Spain. The remains of the ritual burial are discovered in a cave that became known as the Pit of Bones (Semo de los Huesos). Our ancestors had learned to live together. They had practiced compassion. The kicker is: This “funeral took place" thousands of years earlier than archaeologists had ever suspected. We wonder: what would our ancestors think of the way things have turned out? 

6. Evolution of the Mind   

The Earth has had enough of us. We can no longer safely inhabit this planet. We have, however, evolved and grown, so humans set off for somewhere and something new. Not quite “So long and thanks for all the fish,” but something along those lines.

7. Choose 

Can homo sapiens have the kind of future we dream of? There’s a lot of old junk we need to sift through, keeping only what works. Will we make the right choices? Can we find the life we’ve always dreamed of here among the stars? We choose.