McGee Creek, Mono County California October, 2024
Photo by Tim Giller
It should be common knowledge that each of us are literally made of stuff formed in once exploded stars. By this I mean that we all deserve to know this elegantly unifying truth. The vast majority of the universe is hydrogen. Just the tiniest pittance of stuff, all the more complex atoms, the physical world we experience, is comprised of matter barely measurable by comparison over the vastness of time and space. Our sun, giving us light and warmth, all those pinpricks in the night sky, connecting dots across the blackness, intuitively far away and mysterious, these are compressing the hydrogen. In the fusion that creates the energy and light we experience, these stars are producing bigger atoms of which we and the world around us are made. Our existence has required stars to die. Spectacular deaths as supernovas scattering the seeds of new worlds.
On earth most of our hydrogen is contained in the various states of water; vaporous clouds, mist, steam, pools of liquid, rivers, lakes, ocean, and frozen, snowflake, hailstone, glacier. I’m writing from a landscape that gets less than 5 inches of rain a year knowing that I live on an oceanic planet.
It is a timeless thought to wonder about the long journey of a water molecule or perhaps one of its two hydrogen atoms; freezing, thawing, boiling, cascading. In a mountain stream, deep in a canyon, autumn sun glancing through the canopy, light momentarily inundating a world half frozen, half flowing. We have all been scattered, perhaps vastly, yet there can be a quickly shifting shared moment that holds the entire story.