#90, April 03, 2002
The dust cloud blew into
town out of the west . . . the far, far west. So far west, better make that
"The Far East." March 28, 2002, the weather report calls for
increasing high clouds of Gobi Desert dust.
Every now and then, massive
spring windstorms on the Mongolian highlands raise a cloud of dust high into
the jet streams, where it spreads across China and Korea, the Pacific, and
North America. In China, visibility drops to the hundreds of feet, temperatures
drop by tens of degrees. In the US, the daytime skies are tinged with tan, and
sunsets glow a deep bloody red.
Do you ever really think
about dust, what it is? There's a scene in "Monty Python and the Holy
Grail" where the wise knight Sir Bedevere, using the Socratic method to
guide a mob toward the true identity of a suspected witch, poses the question,
"what also floats on water?" The moronic villagers toss out a variety
of answers: bread, cider, gravy, cherries, mud, churches, lead. But my favorite
answer, the one containing the hidden wisdom, is "very small rocks."
This peasant, straining his tiny brain, thinks that if rocks were only small
enough they could float.
Indeed they do. Rocks, in
the form of powdery dust, float on water, and they float in the air. So the
dust that was once the clays and silts of the Gobi Desert gets lifted on the
back of the wind and conveyed to the skies of Petaluma. But dust is not made up
only of dissolved inorganic rocks. One hundred million years ago, an
egg-stealing oviraptor laid its own eggs in the sand dunes of Outer Mongolia. A
flash flood buried the eggs in mud, where they became fossils. One hundred
million years later, erosion revealed and released them to the wind. The
microbits of fossilized carbon were swept into the airstream, headed who knows
where.
Maybe some carbon atoms
from that egg fell onto a Chileno Valley meadow during last April's windstorm.
Then maybe they were absorbed by some grasses, eaten by a Holstein, and bonded
in the amino acids of her milk. The carbon, its six electrons humming around
six protons and neutrons, was transformed into Real California Cheddar, heated
with chicken eggs over a carbon methane flame until I swallowed the gooey chewy
mess with great satisfaction. Mmmmm, that's great dinosaur!
It's hard to breath in a
dust storm (but it's harder to not breathe in a dust storm!) Keep counting your
breaths, and count yourself lucky. No doubt that the Buddha encountered some
strong headwinds as he walked the paths of northern India, 2500 years ago. With
his each and every breath, he expelled carbon dioxide, his metabolic
"rinse water." Little bits o' Buddha, broken-down parts of his head,
his hands, his heart, were carried on the breath of Gaia to who knows where.
When you combine the global
atmospheric circulation system with our body's relentless recycling of its
gazillions of atoms, you get some startling statistical probabilities: right
now, as your read this, you have at least one atom from the Compassionate
Buddha, one from the Loving Jesus, one from Wise Mohammed. And one from Genghis
Khan, merciless warrior of the Gobi Desert.
Who are you? The atoms that
make up your stomach lining are completely recycled every few days. All your
skin is shed, cell by cell, every few months. In fact, none of the atoms in
your body today were in your body a year ago. From the molecular perspective,
you're always coming and going. You are like the earth, with mountains
thrusting up against the rains and winds that tear them down. Oceans become
deserts while continents drift across the face of the globe like clouds of
pollen on a pond.
So what remains? Are you
just dust, caught in an eddy of the wind? Are you no more than the sum of your
particles?
No, says your Buddha atom.
Listen to your breath. You are so much more.
You are the Buddha.