The Suitcase Lady

Cosmic

January 1, 2013, 11:16 pm

Let the New Year begin with brevity, clarity and light.

In the course of last year’s reading, I came across two elegant statements from two brilliant writers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the The Hayden Planetarium in New York City, explains cosmic reality:

Want to know what we are made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in stupendous explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen – are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.

Michael Perry, a Wisconsin author, poet, farmer, paramedic and chicken-raiser, shares this observation on our situation:

The frozen air is bell-jar still. The sky is deep black, the stars pressing down brilliantly all around, and I am reminded that we are not beneath the constellations, but among them.

So we are simultaneously the stuff of stars and amongst the stars……a good thing to remember as we embark on this year’s journey around our own star, a.k.a. the sun.


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