Stardust

You can't possibly imagine how grateful I am for the Hubble space telescope.

People talk about the universe a lot, about it being some sort of throbbing being, full of kindness, about how the universe wants to wrap you in her arms.  It became one of those things, in my mind, that hula hooping twenty two year old girls talk about.  It became a reason to roll my eyes.

Then, I went with my girls and husband to see the Hubble IMAX movie.  They were bored.  Scouty and Louise couldn't sit still.

I was moved to tears.

There were pictures of little galaxies, hundreds of billions of miles away and star nurseries, where particles pick up mass and become brand new suns.  Black holes are so dense that all they are is gravity, they are so dense that even light can't escape them.  There were fledgling solar systems, with burgeoning orbits, and great clouds of space dust with light passing through.

Everything, including me and my children, in the universe is made up of 12 particles of matter.

We are the universe and the universe is in us.

(See that?  I just became one of those universe people.)

How can I worry so much about the details of my life, when there are hundreds of billions of suns existing in hundreds of billions of galaxies, and we're all made of the same things?  How can I worry, when I'm a hydrogen molecule that was born in the belly of an exploded star?

I've felt something wake up in myself, lately.

I will admit to you freely that it's probably the medicine I'm taking.

I feel like learning terrible and beautiful things, about how tiny and how significant I am.