One chilly evening, whereas standing at a campfire on a mesa in southwest Colorado, the celebrities burn in horrific blazes consuming themselves with a most stupendous change of matter and vitality. It’s a distortion of Earth’s ambiance that causes them to twinkle. However you may also think about that the fixed movement of air and ambiance, of warmth rising and chilly falling, is an change of ethereal matter reworking from one state of being to a different.
The celebs sparkle, every one like a pied piper. The campfire smoke drifts randomly upward, betraying a sure goal. My ears ring. An odd strain in them tries to equalize. I swallow and stretch them from inside out to alleviate the strain. My head, with all its thought-memories is sort of a bodily drag, an anchor.
I appear to be essentially the most fixed, unchanging being within the equation; dormant compared with the celebrities. But, right here I’m on the different finish of their mild, questioning what I’m, what I’ve been and what determines what I’ll change into. How am I modified, newly shaped, renewed, with every minuscule invisible-to-the-naked-eye transformation? Within the combustion of every second of life by which what I as soon as was now not is, besides maybe in reminiscence? Reminiscence. It too is topic to the thermodynamics of existence.
Concentrating, I pinpoint a nodule of breath touring downward by way of my nostrils into my stomach, sinking and searching for reference to the bottom. Some a part of me pushes out and down; the half that is aware of the connection. One other reaches upward and a sense extends concurrently from me to the starry darkish and from the flicker to me. My being awakens and swells, and merges with the black. I feel-feel that I’m as mysterious because the evening, as full and infinite. Cause quietens and, momentarily no less than, permits me to be within the thriller, witness it, journey alongside the strands of sunshine emanating from the celebrities to the time of origins—mine, civilization, Earth itself.
I search the reminiscence of all that, saved, certainly, in my being, in my flesh and bone, in my spirit. However the sensation lapses and the reminiscence of my life and physicality train their rights to isolate me from the devastating blow of infinity, from the everlasting blackness by way of which the magnificent stars can muster solely a sliver of sunshine to displace it, to crack it open solely sufficient to be seen to the bare eye.