We Are All Stardust

You wake up and you look out your bedroom window and you see it’s another beautiful summer day. You hear the birds singing, you see the flowers opening in the sun, and you smell the fresh, clean summer wind.

You see a deer peacefully eating a plant in a field, you see a bee hopping from flower to flower, and you see puffy, ephemeral white clouds, majestically floating in a bright, crystalline-blue summer sky.

You think how wonderfully balanced nature is — the soil feeding the flower, the flower feeding the bee and the deer, the clouds floating above created from rain and rain created by clouds and the rain that formed the oceans and the lakes and the ponds and the rivers — and all of them full of life and all of them life-sustaining.

You look up at the sun and you know that everything is powered by sunlight — the oceans, the plants, the animals, even you — all solar-powered.

You think how powerful the sun is and how significant it is – indeed, you realize if the sun would burn out right now all life on Earth would end and the world would be a barren, frozen wasteland. And you think how insignificant the sun is, just an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy spinning around in space and traveling through the universe. One of the trillions of stars in one of the billions of galaxies in the universe.

You marvel at how something so big and powerful — something that sustains all life on our tiny, insignificant world, can be so small and insignificant in the grandeur and the incomprehensible vastness of the universe.

As you pensively look out your window into the heart of this summer day, you realize how truly insignificant you are – and everyone else is. We are all made of stardust and every single living thing on Earth was born from the death of a star.

You ponder that, You are stardust. Everyone you love is stardust. Everyone and everything that ever grew or walked or swam on this planet was born from the death of some start somewhere in the darkness of the universe.

The deer eats the plant that grows in the sun that shines on the Earth that spins around the sun which spins around the center of the galaxy which spins around the universe and you are just a passenger on an incomprehensible journey.

You walk away from the beautiful picture of summer that nature has painted in your bedroom window and you sit down in your kitchen and you read the newspaper.

There’s a war here, thousands killed. There’s a war there, and thousands are killed. An airplane goes missing, and hundreds missing. A plane was shot down, and hundreds dead. Suicide bombers blow up a shopping center, and dozens were killed.

All for what? Ideology? Religion? Greed? You think — the world and the solar system and the galaxy and the universe are so balanced and so beautiful and so incomprehensible — and you and everyone else and everything else is so insignificant.

You think we are all insignificant – grains of sand on a tiny little corner of a tiny little beach in a tiny little corner of the vast ocean of the cosmos.

You think of how much humans have interfered with the natural course of life and the peace and balance of our planet.

You think how petty our differences are and how grand and important our similarities are — we are all passengers on this tiny, pale blue dot sailing through a universe so huge we can’t even comprehend it.

We are all born and we all die and we are all as insignificant as a grain of sand on some lost beach in the South Pacific. One grain of sand out of trillions of quintillions of grains of sand.

Five-hundred people killed today in this war, two-hundred people killed today in that war, three hundred killed by a bomber, two-hundred ninety-eight souls shot from the sky bodies shattered, families and hearts broken. You ponder this and ask: Why?

Your thoughts float with the clouds but your heart is heavy. Our differences are tiny and our similarities are overwhelming yet the world is teeming with hate, greed, wars, suffering, hunger, desperation, and sickness.

The astronaut, author, and humanitarian Ron Garana, said this as he circled our tiny blue planet on the Space Station.

“When I looked out the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them. And I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive,” Garan said in the video.

“I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life,” he continues. “I didn’t see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie.”

You wonder why we have allowed the world to get so out-of-balance when the universe is so balanced. Everything that ever will be is already here. Everything that ever was is everything that is and everything that ever will be.

Our insignificance is staggering. Our hubris is laughable.

We are all the same. We are all stardust. All the elements of our world and every one of us are made of stardust. We are the progeny of stars that exploded and died long, long ago.

You look out your kitchen window and you see a beautiful summer day — and a butterfly.

And you wonder

Why.