Some perspectives I considered this morning while meditating (and pondering) with my candle, my hottub and an apple:
The candle, the cloud, the apple and I are all brothers & sisters in the Divine Family (with God & Mother Nature as our parents.) We are all fellow actors in the Cosmic Play. We are all fellow dancers in the Cosmic Dance. We are all unique and diverse instruments in the Cosmic Orchestra. We are all important teammates in the Game of Life. Each of these perspectives deserves it’s own essay. . . but today’s reflections are about how we are all Divine Recycling Engines for the Big Three molecules of life: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
Why does the candle flame continue? Because there’s a wonderful, relentless natural tendency for change . . . and a wonderful, divine, natural tendency for carbon, oxygen and hydrogen to bind to each other in various combinations. For awhile. They closely associate with each other (get married?), then disassociate for awhile, and then re-associate with other atoms in our Earthly home. Like a courageous (?brash) young man at a dance, the oxygen in the air has a tendency to butt in to the slow dance that has been going on for 300 million years between the carbon and hydrogen atoms in the paraffin (which has been buried underground in the form of oil). When the oxygen taps the shoulder of the hydrocarbon molecule in the candle, the molecule ‘goes along with’ the polite request for a recombination, and the oxygen atoms leave the party arm-in-arm with either a carbon atom (as carbon dioxide) or hydrogen atoms (as water). These happy new triads spread throughout the warm blanket of our atmosphere. For awhile.
Clouds, through their unique and crucial ability to create rain and snow, are wonderful divine processes to recycle these gaseous water molecules back into our fellow living creatures in our biome.
Plants (with the help of the genetically unrelated chloroplasts in their cells) then function as unique, miraculous, self-organizing living processes (or recycling engines) which take in carbon dioxide, water and the yang energy of our Sun and create gorgeous new carbohydrate molecules—mainly glucose (C6-H12-O6). The glucose molecules then arrange themselves in long indigestible chains and sheets (cellulose). Or they stay single and abide in nutritious, digestible grains, nuts or fruits. For awhile.
Animals like us (with the help of the genetically unrelated mitochondria in our cells) then function as unique, miraculous, self-orgainizing living processes which take in glucose and burn it as fuel. That burning, like that in the candle, then releases the carbon atoms (as carbon dioxide in our exhalations) and the water molecules (as urine and sweat) back into the atmosphere and biome.
That burning also allows us to create many other types of gorgeous, functional biomolecules that we temporarily use in the dynamic, everchanging processes which are our bodies. So we borrow atoms from the Cosmic Library, use them for awhile, then return them (recycle them) back to our Earthly environment. When we die, especially if we are cremated, all of ‘our’ atoms (which are really not ours) are returned to the Cosmic Library so that they can be checked out by other living and nonliving citizens of the Earth.
It’s both mind-boggling and comforting for me to realize that all of the beautiful atoms currently happening in me were once happening in stars, and in the plants that were living 300 million years ago, and/or were once happening in the hydrocarbons of candles (or oil), and/or were once happening in clouds or rivers, and/or were once happening in the structure or fruits of plants, and/or were once happening in animals who breathed them in and out, and/or in people (especially loved ones) who have been cremated.
How and why does this miraculous, complex, harmonious, industrious Cosmic Recycling Process continue? A gong should ring now, to remind me that I’ll never know, because my thinking is limited by the use of words . . . but it’s convenient for me to credit it to the inherently unknowable metaphysical forces of Divine Grace . . . which, to me, is the same as crediting it to the harmonious yin/yang dance between Mother Nature and God.
WOW! Yes,our thinking is limited by the use of words. And no, we will never know because there is just one God and that is not you or me or anybody else.
Posted by: Sussy Hidalgo | 02/19/2011 at 10:05 PM