We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
Joni Mitchell
Compared to the great vastness of the cosmos, the ocean of deep time, my individual existence is a blip, a bubble in the foam on the surface of a flowing river. I am a momentary arrangement of atoms and molecules - an arrangement that lives and moves, to be sure, an arrangement that thinks, laughs, appreciates beauty, dreams, and loves - but a mere arrangement nonetheless, a transient state, an ephemeral gathering. Soon the blip will go out, the bubble will pop, the arrangement will dissolve, molecular bonds released by entropy. My consciousness will cease. But the molecules that once were me will still exist. The atoms that made up my body - iron, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, all the heavy elements forged in the crucibles of dying stars - will remain. Liberated from their temporary homes, they will rejoin the rest of the planet, taking new shapes, finding new arrangements, becoming part of other life. I will, in a sense, become merged with everything.
I will be the momentary sparkle of sunlight on the surface of a flowing mountain stream. I will be high in the stratosphere, near that ineffable boundary where life-giving blue fades to violet and black. I will be subducted into the planet's core and join the three hundred million-year cycle of the continental plates. I will be the intense red and yellow of a tree's leaves in autumn, the flash and swoop of a dragonfly's glittering wings, the sleek white bolt of a deer's tail, the brown feathers of a soaring hawk, the silver scales of a leaping fish. I will be in each drop of rain in a storm, each wave in the ocean, each breath of a newborn child. And billions of years from now, when our sun swells and blasts the Earth's atmosphere away, I will be there, streaming away from the charred remnant of the planet into space, to rejoin the stars that gave my atoms birth. In the fullness of time, I will become distributed throughout the entire cosmos. And perhaps some day, innumerable eons from now, on the warm, sandy shore of some inconceivably distant young planet, a molecule that once was part of me will take part in a series of chemical reactions that may ultimately lead to new life - life that will in time leave its primordial sea, climb up onto the beach, and look up at the sky and wonder where it came from.
And the cycle will begin again.
I wish I had written this, but alas, I did not.
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/stardust.html
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