Star Powder

Have you ever seen the dark sky and felt that something is calling to you? It doesn't happen by chance. Every particle of your flesh melted into the star core.

You are, truly, ashes of stars; your galaxy, our Milky Way, is a whirlwind of one hundred billion stars. A spinning disk of smoke, earth and glow that rotates at eight hundred twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour.

At its core, a giant black hole, Sagittarius A, weighing four million suns and we, in one distant arm, orbit around a common star: our Sun. A granule on an infinite coast.

But look further away. The Milky Way is just one among two trillion visible galaxies, Two trillion. They all possess billions of stars.

And around several, planets. How many worlds? Difficult to calculate, some may have life, others, seas of rock. Others, crystals falling. Space is rarer and more beautiful than imagined.

The light you see from the stars traveled for years, centuries, eras to reach your sight. Looking at Andromeda, you see a light that broke two and a half million years ago.

You observe yesterday. Astronomy is a temporary vehicle. And you are the explorer. Why does it count? Because it reminds us of how tiny and magnificent we are.

In an unfeeling cosmos, existence is a miracle - the mind, a radiance. And yet, we can understand it. We can measure, conceive, dream; we are the way in which the universe is known.

Therefore, if you feel lost, look up. That faint glow is your home. That silence contains stories.

You were part of the process. You're not isolated. You are built of the same material as galaxies. And that, dear reader, is the most remarkable thing of all.