Everyday miracles 5: we are stardust

The Hubble telescope shows galaxies out to near-infinity: galaxies sprinkled like stardust to the farthest edges of the universe: video and photo album. Some of the most distant have just been identified by their deep "red shift". This is heic1317a.

Listen to Joni Mitchell's Woodstock as you watch:

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "Where are you going?"...

We are stardust.We are golden.
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to lose the smog,
And I feel to be a cog in something turning...

We are stardust. We are golden.
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration.

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky,
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation.

We are stardust.
Billion year old carbon.
We are golden..
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Further reading: Quaker Mary Coelho on the new cosmology. Biologist Edward J Greding Jr, Journey into Deep Time. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry book The Universe Story (1992). Feature film Journey of the universe (2011) by Swimme and Mary Ellen Tucker of Yale FORE. Sam Guarnaccia's music Emergent Universe Oratorio (Sep 2013).