If people truly knew the miracle of science, they’d build a different kind of altar.
Not of gospel, gold or greed. But sand, sun and stardust.
They’d gather where the tide pools teach the patient art of adaptation, where tide and time have carved cathedrals from nothing but persistence.
They’d bow before the ancient light that traveled billions of years to reach their upturned faces, carrying stories of worlds that died before Earth dreamed.
Their hymns would be the hum of atoms, the secrets that electrons share as they leap between their shells.
They’d celebrate the sacred chemistry that turns sunlight into sugar, sugar into thought, thought into love.
We are the universe learning to marvel at itself.
And in their reverence for what is, rather than what might be, they’d find infinity in the endless depth of now.
We are given a handful of years in a place that does not end.
A body that wears out, in a universe that does not tire.
We fall in love, we grieve, we build homes of wood and laughter, all while the galaxies wheel above us like they have for billions of years.
The stars don’t notice. The earth will go on.
So meaning is not in them, but here: in the touch of a hand, in the courage of hope, in the choice to rise each morning knowing how little time is ours to claim.
