Owed to Dust

"Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." (Genesis 3:19)

This is no curse. We misunderstand our own mythology, I think, if we pity Adam and Eve as they leave Eden with these words echoing in their - our - ears.

This is only part of our legend, this expulsion business. This last bit, with snakes and awkwardly-placed fig leaves, looms too large in history for me. Original sin gets too much play and makes it easy to overlook the first chapter of our story.

Part One focuses on the goodness of everything. This is a message we need more than ever. God is in all, and all is in God. Especially dust, fashioned through fusion in the cores of gloriously radiant stars. This is no sin-tainted past nor a cursed or even morbid future, more of a glorious everything beyond time. 

I'm learning how to return to dust. Turn again. See dust again with new eyes.

Lent starts with smears of ash, reminding each other of our mortality. That seems like a small view of this season and of ourselves. Isn't there cause to rejoice that we have any moments at all, and that the vast majority of them are simply beautiful? 

I smirk each time I look again and notice that the dusty orb under our feet holds gravity just strong enough to keep coffee in mugs. It's wondrous that our soil-caked home is cohesive enough to allow tiny blobs to evolve into bipeds like me and you. 

We turn again dust that's dirt over and over in our hands, mixing it with water enough to form a patty like a treasure from summer sandboxes. Ancient seabed, Paleozoic sediment shows up now in my hand as we skim rocks at the swimming hole, and now I see a trilobite from 500 million years ago. The trail up Bridgton's Pleasant Mountain turns as switchbacks, revealing tender humus down low and windswept granite up high, then vistas of stardust as trees, lakes, clouds, and each other.

I look at dust again and see the beach. I hear my wife telling me that my mother is laughing at me as I splash February salt water on my cheeks because that's what she always does when we're at the shore. I taste that salt and the hard-boiled eggs and other food dusted by wind-whipped sand, because my Dad insists that April picnics on Cape Cod are the thing to do.

May we return to dust and catch a glimpse of our full selves and everything as sent from supernovae, an expulsion worth hanging onto as a delivery into glorious being. Walt Whitman reframed grass, calling it the journey-work of stars and we are much the same, endlessly and brilliantly coming together and falling apart. Let us be on our way, so very good.