Another old blog entry I am reposting here…
An excerpt from Mark Morford too cool not to share…
It would appear there are far more stars in the sky than once believed. In fact, the raw number of stars we once thought existed in space-time might just actually triple, thanks to new findings by scientists with very large brains. The number of stars, they say, might now be somewhere around 300 sextillion.
Tasty word, sextillion. And 300 of it is a 3 plus 23 zeroes, or three trillion times 100 billion, or a number so mind-scramblingly large that to imagine it crosses some internal threshold of basic understanding, hurling us headlong into realms of magic and surreality that makes the world turn tiny and translucent.
Oh and BTW? 300 sextillion, says our sly scientist, also happens to be the rough sum total of all cells inhabiting all human bodies on planet earth at this particular moment. 300 sextillion stars, 300 sextillion cells. Isn’t that fascinating? Isn’t that an odd coincidence?
Well, no, say the wise ones. Not really. Now pipe down and get yourself awed.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/15/notes121510.DTL
This is totally cool and us magical types call this synchronicity… LOL
Speaking of Stars, there is also the knowledge that we are made of star-stuff. A star had to live and die (explode) into the Universe for each of us to have the elements necessary for life.
The statement that we are all “star stuff,” coined by the late astronomer Carl Sagan (not sure if this was before or after Joni Mitchell sang “we are stardust; we are golden. we are billion year old carbon”), is meant to imply more than that we are made of the same elements that stars are made of. Beyond that, the elements themselves (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) were synthesized, cooked up as it were, in the nuclear furnaces that are the deep interior of stars. These elements are then released at the end of a star’s lifetime when it explodes, and subsequently incorporated into a new generation of stars — and into the planets that form around the stars, and the lifeforms that originate on the planets.
For every single atom of carbon within us, a star had to die. Carbon is only created when a star explodes!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/star-in-you.html
A wonderful video to watch from Brian Swimme on how our earth (and us) was birthed (there are seven, watch them all!):
The words, “As Above, So Below; As Within, So Without” isn’t just for witches but is the stuff of life as we know it.
Tree of Knowledge Coven 