24.5 day old moon
26.2 percent lit
“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.”
– “Woodstock”
by Joni Mitchell
March 8, 2018
By Rolf Parker
When I first heard Joni Mitchell (click here) sing this song, accompanying herself with a tremolo-ed Wurlitzer electric piano, I was moved by the idea of being “made of stardust,” without thinking much about whether it was literally true.
While she wasn’t writing a science essay, she was more than half right. We are made of ancient, cosmic dust. Some of that dust originally came from the first explosion, the Big Bang, which released matter into the void in the form of the lightest elements: hydrogen, helium and lithium. (Of those, only hydrogen and lithium are found in human beings.)
The origin of the elements is covered in great detail in an amazing episode of “NOVA,” with the easy to remember title, “The Origin of the Elements.”
“We are all star dust,” says host Neil deGrasse Tyson. “The carbon in our bodies, iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones.”...
This is an article by a teacher to his students. He was moved to write it by another article in "The New York Times" about eating a vegetarian diet.
"Woodstock" was written by a brilliant woman; Joni Mitichell. Her words reflect a beautiful and complex mind, a revolutionary spirit and the morality of the times. I really do like her idea of the gold standard. Our brain trust is still magnificent. Unfortunately, that generation was demonized by a President that valued war and Wall Street as his politics.
