Yes, You Are Home

It was and is a harsh, rugged, precarious and often unforgiving landscape, incessantly rearranged by asteroids, earthquakes, winds, and rains, its underbelly a wriggling subterranean cauldron of bending, melting, shifting rocks, constructed over a vast span of time in a huge area of space from tiny particles of gas and dust, a fragile home into which all the little lives that have come and gone were invited to happen, filled with an abundance of pain, cruelty, and misery, and beauty and love and kindness.

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A long time before today, a star, maybe more than one, collapsed and died, blowing apart into countless pieces which formed a vast cloud of atoms, cold gas, and dust that occupied an area several times larger than the present solar system. This enormous, valuable junkyard of elemental debris slowly drifted through space as one gigantic mass, as if it were a pollen cloud remaining mostly intact without significant dissipation. When viewed in its totality, I could discern a floating menagerie of something that was different from the clear, empty void surrounding it, like a hazy amorphous veil standing in stark contrast against the dark vacant background of the universe.

In some places the air had the appearance of wavy irregularity as when a tank is filled with gas at the pump or when heat radiates from a sun-scorched asphalt road in the middle of summer. Much of what I could observe depended upon the angle of light beaming from the space car’s headlights, brought out even more vividly when using the enhanced sensor technology. It was interesting and fascinating. Other nooks in this neighborhood of the cosmos sometimes issued as if in the guise of a billowy accumulation of dust extricated from an upright vacuum cleaner bag. Just looking at this particular visual presentation threatened to incite a sneeze attack, and I was grateful to be enclosed within the protected confines of the space car!

The interplay of these stray unorganized elements was naturally affected right from the start by the physical laws of the universe. As atoms and molecules bumped into each other, sometimes they bounced back apart with a quick hello and goodbye, but at other times they preferred to socialize at length, remaining physically joined in either a somewhat casual or often more intimate embrace. When, eventually, a cluster of these latter pieces became larger through further collisions, the gravitational pull exerted by this group upon other floating particulates in the vicinity grew more forceful. In this way, more and more atoms and molecules could be lured in, brought together into microscopic, irregularly-shaped, relatively loosely-assembled groupings of dust. It was a handful of wet snow patted timidly against another, becoming a larger mass of slush, not yet molded into a hard round snowball.

Nonetheless, over time, the individual particles mingling in most of these groups became compressed tighter together, forming hard, denser clumps. The snowball was now being compacted. And as additional molecules joined these and they grew slowly in size, eventually they went beyond dust, becoming small, hard pebbles of different shapes. The exterior shell of the space car that I piloted was introduced to these when the pebbles collided with it and inflicted shallow dints. These did not, fortunately, compromise the structural integrity of the vehicle, although they did alter the once-smooth surface so that it now took on the texture of something resembling an orange peel.

Over the course of many more years, the pebbles would ever-so-slowly grow to become big rocks. The larger of these now presented more of a threat to my vehicle and so I had to navigate carefully away from any heavily-populated rock fields. Eventually many of these conglomerations, floating so quietly in space, grew to be hundreds of meters in length and width and then continued to expand at the sluggish rate of perhaps a few centimeters more per year over the course of the next million years.