Dust to Dust: The Cosmic Perspective by Jamie Zvirzdin
Step back in time a moment brief with me.
Back when in space we hung as gas and dust.
Set spinning fast and hot, our Sun burst free,
Light sweeping outward, strong—and we? The frust.
The one percent of matter left behind—
Like balls of lint and hair beneath the bed—
Grew to godly bodies well defined:
Four rocks, a belt, four giants far outspread.
And now we breathe and burn and kiss and weep
Atop a molten core and fractured crust
To Jove ourselves on Earth the price is steep:
Our pale blue dot grows paler in our lust.
Small gods shall clash until the last amen
Then dust to dust we'll gather once again.
This science sonnet, the story of creation, had a creation story itself. The story started in an astronomy room, on a hot night in Nicaragua, and the room was full of fourth graders. Two other teachers and I had taken it upon ourselves to unfold the cosmos to the entire student body of the Pierre and Marie Curie School, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, one grade at a time. A few nights earlier, we'd been forced to cut the lesson short because the building started shaking: swarms of earthquakes are common in a land of active volcanoes, and Masaya Volcano was only eight miles away. But no quakes interrupted the lesson this night, and I made it all the way through my part on the formation of our Solar System, which is one of many star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn is one of many galaxies in our observable universe.
My two Nicaraguan friends, the math teacher and the physics teacher, started leading the fourth graders up to the observatory on the roof. One girl hung back, her face tense. I unplugged the projector and reached for the remote to turn off the miraculously efficient air conditioner. I was grateful for its presence, but it always made the astronomy room as frigid as cold, dark space itself.
"Ready to go up?" I asked the girl. I pressed the red Off button. "We're going to look at Mars, Venus, and the Pleiades tonight."
"The stars scare me," she admitted. "They make me think of death. I don't want to die."
I nodded, impressed with her blunt honesty, but behind the nod, I worried: this fourth grader was already imagining death. I understood, however. Life in the universe is precious, and the conditions for creating life—and balancing those conditions for the continuation of that life—are a hard-won game of statistics. I could offer her no religious comfort, especially as her secular instructor. But maybe cold scientific comfort was, to some degree, still comfort?
"It's true we all die," I said. "But you know what makes me feel better? What we just talked about—" and I repeated the cosmic perspective, how our physical ancestors were the stars, and when they'd lived full lives, their deaths created the elements we needed for our bodies. Our own Solar System was created from the supernova remnants of previous stars. As I spoke, the heat of the tropics seeped back into the room.
When we die, I told her, our physical bodies return to the Earth, and eventually we will be swept back up into a cosmic dust storm, a storm that will create a new star. The leftover dust from this celestial creation will become the new planets and asteroids of that star, and the circle of life will begin again on the cosmic scale. "When I die," I said, "I can return to the stars who made me, and I can help build new stars and planets and people." She considered this worldview, seemed to soften, and she and I left the astronomy room and ascended the stairs to the sky.
Artist’s Statement
Life is precious: I split my time between protecting it and enjoying it.
Jamie Zvirzdin researches ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays at the University of Utah and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University. She has published work in The Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, CONSEQUENCE, Orion Magazine, and elsewhere. Her new book, Subatomic Writing: Six Fundamental Lessons to Make Language Matter, is now available from Johns Hopkins University Press.