ASH

I could write about The Ashes, the biennial tournament between England and Australia.

But pretending to care about that arcane sport wouldn't  be cricket...

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Lent again. Forty days of blog prompts, courtesy the Unitarian Universalist church. I've never gotten through all forty. Let's try again. 

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Mark's absence is still a presence here. I think of him and talk to him daily. Last week I knocked him to the floor by accident; Dolly's upended him too. Luckily he's contained, some ashes in a little pendant. He doesn't say boo. He never did.

Remember his poem?

I am of the Light

Take me and teach me

Love me and lead me

Into the Light always. 

I had a moment the other night. I was laying in bed scrolling aimlessly, and somebody asked "what do human ashes look like under a microscope?

They look like nebulae.

I could hear Mark softly saying, from somewhere in the Light, "I told you so".

Today is Ash Wednesday in the Christian faith. On this day at special church services, the faithful are daubed with ash, which has signified mortality and repentance since ancient times. The ash is imposed in the shape of a cross, and the worshipper is told "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return".

Kinda hits different looking at that "dust". Even if it's brushed off as a product of extreme heat. 

I look at that ash and I hear Joni Mitchell:

We are stardust, we are golden

We are billion-year-old carbon

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden...

Carl Sagan, who disdained the standard definitions of God but who denied he was an atheist, put it this way: 

We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff...

Mark used to riff on that theme endlessly. He is why I'm not afraid of death at all. I'm not looking forward to the pain of dying, but death doesn't  faze me. 

Human ash, like other kinds of ash, can make excellent fertilizer. Which means even if we stop growing after death, we can help something else grow. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed...another thing Mark was keen to tell me...

There are forty of these. Some will spawn more text than others. Which is excuse-speak for "I can't think of a damn thing else to say" on this topic.