Recent conversations have lead me back down the old road of trying to conceptualise the cosmos above me. Whereas some marvel at the tiny rays of light as holes in the floor of heaven, i myself view it as the machine. Ancient beyond thought. Aeons of constant vast motion and not a single rusty cog, not one groan of an overworked gear or pully. all is as it should be.
What is it?
Observation leads us to believe that they are gigantic states of mass and matter separated by the absence of the former. Different states of that matter produce different results, one side you have a sun. massive amounts of energy bathing the darkness in light and the cold with heat. on the other you have small dots of solidified star stuff. Cooled down globes of molten hot metals, like raindrops frozen mid air. Then you have clouds of gas and dust held together by their sheer enormity. Toxic and lifeless in our bodies, and yet beautiful parts of the whole without them. no matter where you look in the sky there are unseen beauties, Clouds with more colours and shades of the rainbow.
surely somewhere on one of those trillions of specks is more of this. Life. Does there need to be?
Does all of that alien orchestra of the universe have to have something that looks like us to be more? Or do WE have to be more and realise that we ARE the stars. We are made of tiny fragments of what comes from them, we live our lives illuminated by them. We are the sons of the sun. The gentile ghosts getting a milliseconds perception in the blazing everything.
Why?
'God knows'
We must always remember that why is a human thing. Its ours, something we created. And idea to help us understand. Its is what defines us, what shapes us and makes us different. We are aware of ourselves more than the universe above our heads. We see our skin, we feel our bodies, we think with our minds. And yet somehow, its seems we have forgotten our true family. The only way that the sun is not your father is that you cannot conceive the time and space it took to link you both. The distance between us and our giver of warmth and light is only 6 minutes away to light, but to us its YEARS of travelling. Our closest star is however many light years away. That is to say you would have to travel as fast as the fastest thing in the universe for YEARS to to ever be able to say hello face to face. So our relationships to these things are so much more different to everything else. Everything is our family, but we still view it all with our tiny perception of what time is.
Time is to us the tick tock of the clock, the working week, and the shorter weekend. Somewhere in this system we forgot that it is only equal measurements of the spinning and whirling of this rock we stand on. A year is one full orbit of the sun, a day is one full spin on the rock, a second is a 60th of a 60th of a 24th of a 7th of a 4th of a 12th of that spin, the year. (seconds to minutes to hours to days to weeks to months to years.) you see a second doesnt make sense when you explain it like that, so we explain it in bite size chunks. 10 minutes here, a year there. Everything has a different time scale.
unfortunately ours is too short to be able to watch the universe move and sway in all its colours, we will never see it from start to finish. But still it is still a beauty to behold in its frozen state. in our tiny snapshot.
Next time you look up at our ancestors, creators so old as to have been hailed as gods, remember this;
'We are star stuff'
