The Dust

“We are stardust...,” goes the old song. Billion-year-old carbon. Golden. The beauty of the lyric is the truth held within it. Stardust is comprised of the same elements we find on Earth: carbon, helium, hydrogen and more. A great periodic table of life is swimming in our cells and bloodstreams. Over 40,000 tonnes of this cosmic dust falls to earth each year, as it has since the great geologist in the sky started sprinkling it many millennia ago. It’s truly awesome, isn’t it? As in, full of awe. We literally are stardust.

Let’s rewind. Imagine a stone, carved from the greater earth into a smooth rounded nugget on the riverbed. Its origin is space—all minerals begin in the sky. But as millennia pass, the stone is chipped away at by swirling, sub-marine sediment, and the gentle, constant roll of the river to the sea. Smaller and smaller, each stone breaks down until it becomes soil deposited in a muddy delta. Farmers work the soil to grow plants, which are eaten by animals. Those animals are us. That stardust is us. We grow old. We die. Our carbon becomes one with the earth again. That is, until we grow into a plant and feed the next hungry animal. We are timeless.

I think about this when I think of death. When friends or family pass away, we believe they are lost to our physical world. Some of us embrace the idea that they retire to heaven. Others believe this is where it ends, the blackness wrapping around us, stealing away our loved ones for eternity. But it’s simply not true. We are resurrected.

We are dinosaur blood and bone, recycled through carbon’s infinite path. Our bodies are built from the exact same atoms that swirled in the cosmic soup billions of years ago. Our hair and our hearts holding the same cells as ancient traders, sailors, kings and peasants. We are wooly mammoths and extinct birds. We are trees, rain, mountains and long-extinguished fire. You walk amongst your friends and family today as a biological jigsaw puzzle of countless creatures and vegetation before you. And when you die, you will take parts of them with you, to the proverbial grave, and beyond. You are immortal. You are stardust. You are beautiful. Float on.

—Mike Berard, editor

Dedicated to those we’ve lost, and all they will become. 

Originally published in the 2017 summer issue of Coast Mountain Culture Magazine.