Where you came from

We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be the other word for God — the weakest of the four fundamental forces, yet the great cosmic compactor that made the first atoms cohere into a common center to form the first star: an immense ball of gas, at the core of which was a hydrogen sphere that eventually reached pressures of millions of atmospheres and heated up to millions of degrees.

Source: The 12 kinds of time, the science of what made you you (with a dazzling poem read by David Byrne), an illustrated ode to love’s secret knowledge – 

I just had to share this wonderful essay by Maria Popova in “The Marginalian.”

This is the kind of thinking and writing that shakes out the cobwebs and leaves the reader stunned, somehow different, and primed for transcendent experiences.

–Malcolm