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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 89 across seal rookeries, over the salty Pacific, past the Golden Gate, above the giant Sequoias and across the granite Sierras to me. It is a matter of fact that this wind carries with it a kind of immortality: argon atoms that exist continually in the atmosphere. They do not perish, they do not change, they remain, With each breath I inhale forty million billion argon atoms and exhale them unchanged into the atmosphere, where they are scattered like seeds on the wind. Some of those same argon atoms that swirled in the primeval lungs of the first Devonian fish to slither out of saltwater onto shore will be in my next breath, and those same atoms I exhale will be part of the birth gasp of infants born a thousand years away. I see a circularity, an almost mystical bond between the distant past and the remote future. And if it is true that we are one with the dinosaur and the do-do bird, we are also one with Christ and Michaelangelo, with Mozart and Shakespeare and Thomas Paine. I am not alone in this, nor is anyone. And this is something to celebrate! What is such a moment worth? What would I give for another brief moment like this, so precious, so perishable? I feel as though my vision has been extended. To love is enough. To be loved is enough. |