Ziggy Had It Right...

I took the weekend off.  After my crap week, I felt like disconnecting and just hanging with my wee boys.  In the not too distant future, they won't be around, to warm my heart, or my feet on cold Winter nights.  I won't see happy faces as they dash across a field toward me, every single time making me laugh at the joy and freedom that practically glows around them.

Saturday night I couldn't settle on my book.  Max was all stretched out on one side of me, in my big ol' reading chair, while Ozzy snored at my feet.  It was quiet, except for the low, muffled sounds of the television.  Thoughts of mortality seeped between the layers of my mind.  Not just for the dogs, but for myself, too.  Life is so finite, so incredibly fleeting.

Just as I was headed toward the crossroads of Maudlin and Melancholy, I was distracted by the beginning of a program that I truly enjoy: How the Universe Works, on the Science Channel--and was hit with a serendipitous example of just when you least expect it, or maybe just when you need it most, the Universe not only works, but also provides.

The show was about stars, how they form, how they live, how they die.  The graphics were outstanding, as were the scientists who explained quasars and black holes and white dwarves, colliding pulsars bursting into neutron stars, and the immense and slightly terrifying explosion of a super nova.

When these massive stars die, they seed the Universe.  I could so easily imagine dandelion fluff blowing in the cosmic wind, particles of all that shapes our world swirling, drifting, waiting for the next perfect collision of atoms and matter to birth new stars.  Then, the program finished with stunning photographs of space and stars and planets--the tantalizing supposition that everything around us came from the heart of an exploding star.

Including us, the stardust children of the Universe.

Sunday afternoon.  I'm having my usual phone call with the BFF and I tell her about my mortality funk, followed by learning that we're made from the stars.  She's quiet for a minute, then asks me how that jives with my Pagan-Wiccan-Buddhist self?

I smile.  "Since nobody has a clue what any of it means, I'm good with adding it to the philosophical resume."

She laughs.  "You are such a hippy."

"No," I say, "I'm a star child."