Is Water Older Than the Sun
Is Water Older Than the Sun
Yes…significantly older
Our Sun formed years ago from a giant cloud of gas and dust:
the Solar Nebula
Hydrogen was created at the beginning of the Universe
Oxygen was forged in the core of the first massive Stars that lived and died
before our Sun formed.
From that water was born only a hundred million years after the birth of the universe
Originating in the interstellar medium before the Sun was formed
And then incorporated into the forming planets and comets
The molecules remain intact; it is the hydrogen bonds between them that are
forming, breaking and reforming
attraction between partially positive hydrogen atom and partially negative oxygen atom of another water molecule, break, switch instantly
water moves around: the rapid dance of breaking and forming gives liquid water its fluid nature
its shifting network.
hydrogen bonds create surface tension
enable solvent properties
ancient. new.
*-0-*
Five A.M. - Poem by Allen Ginsberg
Elan that lifts me above the clouds
into pure space, timeless, yea eternal
Breath transmuted into words
Transmuted back to breath
in one hundred two hundred years
nearly Immortal, Sappho's 26 centuries
of cadenced breathing - beyond time, clocks, empires, bodies, cars,
chariots, rocket ships skyscrapers, Nation empires
brass walls, polished marble, Inca Artwork
of the mind - but where's it come from?
Inspiration? The muses drawing breath for you? God?
Nah, don't believe it, you'll get entangled in Heaven or Hell -
Guilt power, that makes the heart beat wake all night
flooding mind with space, echoing through future cities, Megalopolis or
Cretan village, Zeus' birth cave Lassithi Plains - Otsego County
farmhouse, Kansas front porch?
Buddha's a help, promises ordinary mind no nirvana -
coffee, alcohol, cocaine, mushrooms, marijuana, laughing gas?
Nope, too heavy for this lightness lifts the brain into blue sky
at May dawn when birds start singing on East 12th street -
Where does it come from, where does it go forever? .
“I've recovered my tenderness by long looking;
I'm a Socrates of small fury.
The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught
As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,
I can hear light on a dry day.
The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am.”
― Theodore Roethke
Day-blind star. …
"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
Wendell Berry