SHIMMERING STAGES OF LIFE

On the macroscopic scale, somewhere out in near-boundless space there are multitudinous numbers of galaxies in birth, in states of maturity, and in slow (to us) death--each evolving stage lasting hundreds of millions of years.

At the human scale, also, each of us lives simultaneously in stages of birth, maturity, and senescence--from our ignition at birth and finalizing in a low-burning ember lingering in the memories of a few.

Some of the images are of galactic collisions, in which a few hundred million stars on each side, spinning in their own systems, are trying to occupy the same space in energy-events beyond our imaginings. But we can now see in these images some of that slow-motion beauty and relate them to ourselves:

Like individual solitary galaxies

in the vast blackness of space

some floating in shiny gold spirals

some floating like shimmery green amorphous amoebas

some floating in sparkly purple clusters

some shredded by galactic collisions with ragged ends

all waiting to unravel at the end of time.