The Wonder of You

Reflecting on the fragility and impossibility of life and a call to reconnect

Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!

This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.

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I’ve been struggling with what to write for a bit now. I usually publish on Sundays, but I had a busy weekend and wasn’t able to write anything. Now that it’s Monday and October 7, it felt strange to write something that didn’t acknowledge all of the suffering and death over the last year, but I also didn’t want to just write another retrospective.

I’ve been giving it some thought all day, and rather than discuss the politics, morality, or severity of what’s been happening over this past year, I instead want to think about the bigger picture.

Sunset over the dunes of Cape Cod last month (Heath Racela)

For a few days now, my mind keeps going back to a podcast that I heard last week. The Real Organic Project Podcast usually focuses on interviewing organic farmers and others working towards a more sustainable food system, but their most recent episode was pretty out of the ordinary for them.

Marcelo Gleiser is a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. His latest book is The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future. I haven’t read the book yet, but I immediately added it to my list after hearing Gleiser interviewed on the episode.

The premise of both the book (as I understand it) and the interview is looking at the beauty of life on this planet, and in particular, the rarity of life. As Gleiser tells it:

“…we are all part of a galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way has about, nobody counted, but that’s an estimate 200 billion stars, right? So that’s a two with 11 zeros after it. That’s stars, like the Sun. And each one of these stars, or most of them… each one of them has planets… So you do the math and say damn, you know, 200 billion stars. An average of five planets per star, you’re talking about 1 trillion worlds.”

Glesier does not rule out the possibility of life on other planets, but instead focuses on the improbability of life on this planet and all of the things that had to be in alignment for life to first begin here.

He goes on to say:

“You put all this together, and you start to look at the spectacularly mysterious steps for, first of all, for chemistry, to organize itself into biochemistry, meaning you need, you know, to have a molecule of an amino acid, you know, which is the basic stuff they need to make proteins like the stuff of life you need carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur. Where is all this stuff coming from?

All this stuff comes from stars that exploded before the sun was born. Right?

So I will say something that I’m sure many of you guys already know. But we are truly made of dead star stuff. So stars explode, they spread out entrails across interstellar space. These gasses are traveling at incredibly fast speeds. They hit a nascent star system, a baby stellar system, sprinkle the gas cloud with carbon, the calcium there is in your bones. The iron is, you know, hemoglobin, you know, blood. And this stuff, organizes itself into a planet eventually.

And depending on the chemistry, chemical composition of the planet, life can emerge, emerged here, three and a half billion years ago. So somehow, we are animated. And I love the word animated, right? Because animare in Latin is soul. So we are animated star stuff. Right?

And why is that beautiful? That’s beautiful because it’s profoundly mysterious, but also because it connects us to the deep time history of the universe itself. We carry in our bodies, billions and billions of cosmic history in our atoms. So when we go, our atoms will become part of something else. Rocks, other animals, we are part of rocks and animals that existed here before because we are eating this stuff. Our ancestors ate this stuff. So we are recycled stardust.”

This idea of the beauty, fragility, and pure happenstance of life was in my head when I received an email from my daughter’s teacher summarizing the events of the past week as the sixth graders studied geology.

The sixth grade had sorted a fossil collection and lined up the fossils based on their age, with one centimeter representing one million years. After all of the rocks had been lined up in a long row, they could visualize all of humanity’s existence, represented by the width of a single hair.

Compared to this Earth, humankind is brand new. Compared to the universe, our existence doesn’t matter at all. We are a microscopic spec in the timeline- a fleck of dust.

We spend our days worried about emails and shopping and consumption, hardly pausing to think about how our little bodies are connected to something so much bigger. To hear Marcelo Gleiser tell it, we are not just connected, but rather an integral part of this entire system.

We sit on this strange ball of rocks and minerals spinning in the middle of space. The very existence of life on this planet is a miracle. The beauty of each of us is even more profound when considering all of the possibilities that we could have been, given the millions of sperm that could have fertilized the dozens of eggs that ultimately became each of us.

Life is beautiful. Life is special.

Which brings me back to October 7 and what I’m feeling today, in this moment.

The attacks on October 7 that claimed lives were wrong. The killing of somewhere between 41,000 and 200,000 Palestinians is wrong. The killing of thousands in Lebanon is wrong.

America continues to fund all of this large scale death, and we have a leading contender for president bragging about having “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Our relationship with each other is frayed and our relationship with the planet is too.

As I write this, another major hurricane is headed towards Florida, the second in as many weeks. The warm water in the Gulf of Mexico seems to be adding even more fuel to this one, set to make landfall over Tampa sometime in the next day or so as a Category 5 storm.

We’ve seen this happen again and again, but rather than get in touch with our mother planet and heal her, we continue to burn fossil fuels and refuse to accept even the most minor of inconveniences (a paper straw, a reusable shopping bag) to stop the fire from raging out of control.

As I’ve written about before, we ship tomatoes in little plastic containers from Mexico, even though we have an abundance at farms in our backyards. We build components out of cheap parts and expect them to break. We send tons and tons of perfectly good clothing to Chile and Africa each year to join growing landfills simply because we want a new look or a retailer needs to cycle in the latest merchandise.

Each one of us has a special light inside of us. It’s the light of stars that once burned millions of years ago. When we die, our light will go on to become something else. I never thought I believed in reincarnation until I heard Marcelo Gleiser describe that process. But reincarnation is not necessarily about our soul taking on a new form, but rather, our body becoming something new.

As Jack Johnson says:

“They say that new life makes losin' life easier to understand.”

Given our sacred relationship to the cosmos, the Earth, and each other, I leave you all with this quote from Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, which I also quoted last October as all of this was beginning and which still causes me to think:

“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life's potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”

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Related Reading

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America the Beautiful?

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