We are each at the center of the universe, made of knowledge, in bodies of once-living stars

We are each at the center of a universe. We are each made of knowledge incorporated in bodies made from once-living stars. We and the world around us are full of potential.

These are facts as well as metaphors.

I am the child of many stars—as are you. We each contain knowledge accumulated over billions of years—much of it knowledge without a knower. But someday, perhaps it will all be known.

Each cell of each of our bodies contains knowledge, written in its DNA, that could create any number of human children, each a twin to us. That is the potential of that knowledge. To realize that potential requires a human female child, embodied, grown to maturity, or its equivalent: a mother. The knowledge with the potential to produce the body of such a mother is in that same DNA—but requires its own mother to realize it. Somewhere, in the timeless history of the universe, is the mother-to-us-all.

DNA does not contain the knowledge required to sustain a mother through the months that it will take her to assemble a new infant from her unknown knowledge and more star-matter. She needs people around her and her child-to-be, who can sustain her and support her, and who embody that knowledge. We call that knowledge by names like culture and community also collected over billions of years.

I am here because my mother helped the zygote-that-became-me produce the infant Me-At-Birth. The zygote had the potential to produce the infant, and both had the potential to produce each of the successive versions of Past Me up to the version of Present Me who is writing this. And I have the potential to produce a better version of myself.

But only if I make sacrifices. Generations of Past Me have sacrificed ( and sometimes not) to bring Present Me here— this morning, this moment, this place, writing this. And Present You, where you are, when you are, reading this.

I have been given gifts. Shall I not offer something in gratitude?

I first give thanks. My thanks connect me to those who have gone before me. If they have died to bring me here and now, they have not died in vain.

But perhaps they have not died. Maybe they live within me because, as Miracle Max says, they are only mostly dead. Sometimes they speak to me, and sometimes they seem to suffer. If so, I embrace their suffering—embrace them as they suffer. And I hope to ease it and relieve it with my gratitude and the knowledge that they have not suffered and died in vain.

I am grateful. Today I will sacrifice what I can. I will die so that Future Me can wake tomorrow, better than the Present Me that woke today.

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