Totally, Like... Dude!

A long time ago, something happened.

Lots of people try to understand it, but nobody does, really. For lack of better words, the smartest among us called it the Big Bang. Light years, billions of billions, dark matter, black holes -- all concepts beyond comprehending, and more, just popped into existence.

Big Bang. I  like that. Simple. Sensory. Kind of mysterious. Something a bored kid would do just to rattle the cage of boredom.

Well, after the BB, things just floated around for awhile, not knowing how to work together. But then they started to flirt and swirl and coalesce into clouds of matter that, miraculously, heated up, then glowed with fusion.

That was incredible in itself, but the universe wasn't done. Far from it.

Atoms started combining to make elements when these globs of gas collapsed in on themselves in catastrophic super novae.

Heat, explosions, flashes visible within billions of other burning clouds hanging out in galaxies forged the building blocks, the elements we now list on the periodic table. One by one, protons built on neutrons to join in cores of atoms, orbited by electrons, with polarities that would allow them to combine with other atoms that would then form molecules.

Then the elements started to circulate through space and collect in new forms. This took a LONG time and the amounts were just traces carried by comets, asteroids, and other astronomical flotsam.

These minute collections of matter, themselves rare and unlikely, found other itinerant matter and formed alliances. These things -- planets -- cooled and orbited new stars. These little guys started to do things of their own.

Against unimaginable odds, the heat and atmosphere and energy catalyzed into yet another system. Within that, atoms "cooperated" in systems that worked together.

In what may be the worst bet ever made, if you were to put money on the odds before it happened, life began.

There, in a remote corner of nowhere, out of nothing, a jewel more rare than the rarest diamond in terms of universal likelihood -- a neuron -- in the first brain, fired. Then an ego formed, and this ego made itself the source and force of all things.

It held tight the passing gift of light and life and grew afraid of losing it.  

It tried to remember a time before fear, before it had grown apart from forces beyond imagining.

Only fragments of stories about the source remained, and they spoke in low voices, in the dark, close to the running river of constant change.

One by one, fingers relaxed into memory, and the hand of mind began to open. As it did, stardust stirred and rubbed sleep from its eyes.