Sloth and Manatee

When my kids were small they had this toy that was made up of two parts: a clear box full of little flakes of metal stuff, and then a big chunky magnet. You would move the magnet around on the outside of the box, and the shards would follow it and you could make shapes and mountains and it was weird and ghostly and cool.

Then you would take the magnet away and the shards would fall back into a pile. There’s something marvelous about a thing that can be a pile, and then a shape, and then a pile, and then another shape. It is like waves on the ocean. All made of the same thing, and unique at the same time. Irreplaceable.

The raw materials for everything are like this. The metals to make a bicycle. The proteins to make up your cat.

We are the same way, made of entirely recycled materials, moving around and reconstituting. Our own raw materials came from the stars, or as Carl Sagan said, we are “star stuff.”

What this means is, we are made of infinitude.

It is easy to forget about our infinitude, because so much of everything around us is designed to make us forget in order to generate profits for someone. People sell things by making it appear that there are not choices. Social pressure does this. Advertising does this. Politics do this.

All the things do this.

But if we are very quiet, we can hear how infinite everything is, and how infinite we are. We can observe the air and the elements bumping up against each other in these marvelous and huge but also temporary ways. There is no way to conceive of all of the factors that brought you here, or Earth here, or anything here.

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Things Of The Week

Asemic writing is writing without words or symbols, at least from any known system. Type into this and it will make some for you, along with a lil song.

Here, make yourself a little person.

I am enjoying Leaving Home by Mark Haddon, it is autobiographical and kinda grim but also very illustrated and heartfelt and just lovely.

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you feel very infinite, may you look up at the stars, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy