I wake up in the middle of the night and a single star is winking at me above the apartment block roof. Photons fired out thousands, maybe millions of years ago, skimming through space at imaginable speeds, slipping through solar systems, sneaking past planets - one true line not diverted, just a little bent by the occasional nudge of gravity but always returning to its purpose.
Now ancient photons enter my eye and fizz an image down my optic nerve to my brain: a star, a burning giant of gas billions of years old exploding with a light brighter than a million suns; then dying and leaving its elemental afterlife scattered through the drifting dust. That dust coalescing into rocks and rocks crunching into a planet that eventually means I can inherit those same elements in my body, every body, every form of matter around me. We are all literally and symbolically children of the stars, bonded to distant celestial objects through an ancient timeline of unfathomable fortune. The image refocuses on that particular planet being formed in a Goldilocks Zone from gravity-sticky lump of rocks and luck, smashing together, sticking, spinning in just the right place to make our home. Not too hot, not too cold. The image evolves: four billion years of evolution, from blobs of plasma to wriggling life, from stumbling reptiles to shivering mammals. Continents crunching as they cruise through the eons. The image gains humanity: millions of my ancestors living and loving short lives for me to be here, in this bed, looking at starlight and feeling the glaring truth: on the long road of Order to Disorder - a journey of trillions of years uncountable in this fleeting human mind - I am but a flicker, a tiny finger of light and heat, hardly noticeable in this minuscule moment of almost endless time. Yet I am a flame nonetheless, with heat and light and mass and worth. So I must shine, shine as bright as I can, all the brighter for what little light I am. I smile and thank the photons for teaching me, reminding me. What they lack in mass they make up for in wisdom.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |