We Are Made of Stars

I heard recently that the “Big Bang” was less of a bang and more of a slow unfurling into space…whatever “space” was before it was space filled with galaxies. I have always thought of the beginning of time as a major event that happened after a major collision, like maybe the previous solar system collapsed back into a single unit of matter and then sprang back out, like jumping on a trampoline over time.  

I like to think of what it means to us today that the big bang was something methodical, systemic, ordered spirals in the quiet empty. It gives me something like hope that maybe we are living in the spiral time of the universe, that maybe the discord we see actually has meaning, or if not meaning than at least a modicum of order, and order would mean that there is some kind of abiding force in control so I can let myself off the hook a little. 

The whole “butterfly effect” is poetic but I’m realizing it left my young mind with this idea that if I sneezed wrong I could somehow cause the collapse of life on earth. The Butterfly Effect being this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world can cause a tsunami on the other. While I enjoy thinking about this and wouldn’t dispute it’s efficacy, I also have to remember that I’m just not that f-ing important. Or rather, it’s both, and. The world is so much more powerful then I am, even if it started with a tiny bang somewhere out there in space. 

The other thing I think about when it comes to the stars is that they have been traveling none stop for a very long time—like, a few billion years—and there is now more space between them and they probably also still collide every once and a while. I wonder if the stars are feeling the chaos we are brining upon ourselves on earth or if somehow we are following a pattern being played out in deep space. In other words, if I remember I am a star then I have to remember there is space around me too and that we sometimes drift into one another here on the terrestrial plane. 

Am I getting too abstract? I like having a blog because I can wax poetry and no one is going to stop me. But I also don’t want to loose you. 

It’s quite simple though. Is the space we collectively feel from each other on earth indicative of the space the stars feel with each other as well? And is the current catastrophic collision of human being just mimicking an atmospheric collide some where far, far away? Can we just remember we are stars on a journey through space so that maybe we can give ourselves a little break and be good to each other and have that be the butterfly effect that creates change somewhere on the other side of the world?

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 I really just wanted to leave this writing there but it seems like it would be unfair and also confusing because I don’t mean to imply we just pick up a single piece of trash on the ground and clap our hands together at a job well done. There is some shit to do and we all have our own ideas about how it would be best to go. I wish I had more answers but I think at best we are collectively weaving a tapestry of ideas together. In some ways it’s a really beautiful picture. In other ways, we have totally f-ed up the canvas. 

A game I used to play with myself when I was more into drawing was simply making any random mark on a page and then challenging myself to come up with a picture from that. In a lot of ways that is the game we are all playing together: someone makes a mark and then everyone comes together to flush it out into a picture. We have been drawing pictures for a long, long time but for some people it was more of a paint-by-numbers kind of deal. But now is a time we need to be burning the canvas and starting a new picture. Get my drift? 

Eight word poem:

Stars dust, creating change, 

make a new picture.