Life

So the universe is 13.8 billions years old, though this number is of course heinously inaccurate and changes as we learn.

Soon after the beginning of the universe as we thus-far define it, the molecules that create us were born in the bellies of monstrous stars. There were a whole lot of explosions but eventually the 26 elements that make the female body found their way to Earth. This took a really long time.

Elements are not people, so you can imagine how long it took to get to where we are now. 4.5ish billion years. Lots of intense stuff went down during this time.

Then, me. For me, 29 years. I was born the same date as the Chernobyl disaster. For other people, fewer or more years, but for everyone between one breath and 123 years. We took a long time to cook!

(Just a side note to emphasize that mothers literally create consciousness. No one else can do this or replicate this. It is the single most impressive and powerful scientific capability in the known universe).

Because energy can be neither created nor destroyed, we go the way we came.

This means that I believe that we once had a universal all-encompassing shared consciousness, beyond ego, beyond form, that halts (nah, transforms) for a brief 123 years to teach us some shit then turns us back into compost. So after our bodies and brains die, our consciousness returns to the Borg (save me, Janeway!) or universal consciousness. Our elements, so briefly in perfect order, return to the inexorable grip of entropy. Calcium, carbon, nitrogen, return to our mother–not my mom. To the Earth.

Then, chaos! Our elements join with others, the illusion of time is destroyed, we are not tethered by the mundane lull of gravity, nor the limiting vision of rods and cones. We are home, now–we see it all.

Step back. The Earth loses her grip on her daughter moon. The sun becomes a boring old red giant and incinerates most of Sol (our solar system). This will happen in about 4-6 billion years (you’ll notice the Earth formed and will be destroyed around the same time on either side of US, because we are literally in the very middle of 4ish dimensions of reality in every direction. WE ARE THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING. Breathe deeply). The sun jettisons our elements toward or away from the black hole at the centre of the milky way. Time passes. The Milky Way meets Andromeda. The women dance.

Dark matter presses; gravity pulls.

What happens after that is a bit of a puzzle. As dark matter pushes all the stars apart, fewer stellar nurseries can recycle the power to create new stars. Everything gets really far apart. Fewer planets collide, introducing water to fewer worlds. Eventually, all the lights go out and it gets really cold. This will take approximately the same amount of time as it took the universe to get around to forming earth after the big bang (see symmetry).

But then what? Don’t worry. You won’t know while you’re alive, you have to wait til you die. Bummer!

Back to earth, woman!

Think about your eyes. You eyes take in all information and yet give out very little. A stream of information exits your mouth: some of the info you’ve learned, some garbage, breath, shouts, gasps, condensation, vapour. Your eyes are like black holes, your mouths accretion discs, your words and breaths jets. Everyone around you is another star you circle. Sometimes you crash into one another – stellar collision. You can prolong your life this way–or shorten it. Sometimes you suck the life out of a too-giving nearby star. Stellar vampirism. Or have your elements taken–stellar sacrifice.

All your stuff, all those inanimate objects? Stellar dust. It’s just there to fuel you, to bolster you. You can actually just leave it behind.

Your pets? Kind of like planets, or moons. Or really, stars in their own rights. Life is abundant but never redundant.

We are, right now, made of the ingredients from stars. To whence we return. Gifted by our mothers with consciousness for this outrageously short period of time, where we destroy white capitalist hetero patriarchy, achieve peace, and become compost–

to feed the seed that flowers into the plant the mother eats (as above so below; feed the earth, feed her daughters). The baby is nourished, she lives, she dies, it’s all. so. small.

Or not.