Everything is what it is until it isn’t
on being starstuff
Everything is what it is until it isn’t
There’s a freedom I feel deep within as the photo from thousands of light years away scrolls onto the screen. It is a mass of magenta and crimson lights with specks of my favorite shade of blue swirling towards each other.
The words beneath it speak to my soul, “the collision is expected to last for “several million years,” and to alter the shape of both objects once the merger is completed.” Two spiral galaxies have met in the vastness and are forever changed. They look to be holding hands as one wraps it’s arm around the other.
Everything is what it is until it isn’t; evolving, combining, becoming.
This collision doesn’t appear to be unusual as a few days later I read another article about the coming together of two galaxies — giant clouds of gas and stars, close neighbors of our own. This writer has a slightly less joyful perspective on mass collisions and frames it in a way that reminds me of previous relationships I’ve experienced. “The larger of the two is sucking in material from its smaller counterpart, pulling the smaller galaxy apart star by star.”
Everything is what it is until isn’t; growing or dying. Maybe both, it’s all perception.
The headline presses in with it’s reminder of a past life I’ve worked so hard to leave behind, “Shredded galaxy is disintegrating before our eyes after smash-up.” It could be describing me not so long ago.
What makes these two collisions different? Why do we perceive one as hellbent on destruction and the other as blending to become something other?
I wonder at the fierceness and strength of the blending galaxies, so well formed and distinct, their dance is combining them into something new. And yet…you cannot be unmade
You cannot be unmade.
My eyes trace over the stars moving towards one another. Parts of them will die while other pieces will be birthed by their union. Pain and joy, beauty and destruction. But this future newness will always hold a trace of the energies from who they once were.
I was once torn apart much like the smaller galaxy and yet here I stand, strong and fierce, something other. Multiple collisions have shaped me into who I am becoming.
On my thirty-sixth birthday, a friend and I speak of reincarnation.
She’s very certain that among the many lives she’s lived, once she was as an elephant matriarch. This reminds her of the nurturing, strong parts of her — something new, yet full of old magic.
She believes that once I was a New York heiress. I consider this idea and decide I’m not altogether opposed to it as I consider my parts. The elaborate mirror I paid movers to haul up four flights of stairs, almost tumbling to its death on the cliffs below, reflects back to me who I might of been — the power which remains.
“We are all bits and pieces of once burning stars,” I speak confidently at first but whisper the next part — uncomfortable with the unverified nature of my words, “Sometimes I have such difficulty with this body. Maybe I’m just stardust learning how to live in flesh.”
“Sometimes I have such difficulty with this body. Maybe I’m just stardust learning how to live in flesh.”
Part romantic, part scientist, it is all a bit tough to swallow though the beauty of it echoes in me.
I’m a meaning maker. I need to know how this is useful for me in the present moment. My mind drifts off in the direction of nebulas I might have lived in. The colors of it dance around the edges of my eyes. I wonder if my particular traces of stardust are why one part of my brain holds too much electricity. Maybe my synesthesia which causes me to see people, relationships, music, and words as color is just leftover bits of when I saw the universe as connected instead of the singular, colliding pieces.
Compassion for my clumsy, sometimes awkward self fills me at this thought and reminds me of words from a friend on that same birthday, “Don’t ever lose your intensity. It’s beautiful and makes you who you are.”
Meaning has been made. Ancient fires still burn within. I am multitudes. I’ve collided with my otherness and am forever altered.
