“I hear there’s a giant iceberg heading your way,” said Phyllis, sitting comfortably in Texas, chatting over skype.
“Iceberg?” I queried, baffled.
Phyllis is my guest on this Friday’s podcast, and we were warming up to record the show while Michael was setting the recording levels.
Also warming up, I now know, is a 19 km slice of Antarctica, aka B17B, weighing 20 billion tonnes and heading towards the west coast of Australia.
“When I was in Antarctica,” Michael joined in, “I had a whisky on ice, chips of iceberg ice, water frozen in ancient times melting into my spirit.”
Actually he didn’t say “melting into my spirit,” but I thought I’d add a bit of poetic licence and word play because of what happened next.
“That’s what happens every day,” I said, meaning to add to the magic but, in fact, fizzing the conversation. “Every time you drink water you’re taking atomic particles that have been in existence since the beginning of time into your body.”
“Trust a scientist to take away the romance,” Michael said, understandably dejected.
I remember when this thought first struck me. I was running in the country, some twenty or more years ago, breathing in the smell of the trees, the leaves, feeling at one with nature as I ran effortlessly, fuelled by a natural endorphin high. I suddenly got that I and everything around me was composed of particles that had been recycled since the beginning of time, and that would continue to be recycled until whenever.
The oxygen I was breathing into my lungs to become a part of my being for a short while had recently, perhaps, been released by that tree over there, and the subatomic particles making up that oxygen may well have passed through the body of a dinosaur, and may well, in the future, spend some time being a bird, an opera singer, a spaceship, a mountain, a snowflake, an iceberg.
I got that everything and everyone is connected, that we are an energy and space continuum. What appears to be solid (like me, you, an iceberg) is really, at the subatomic level, mostly space, sprinkled with particles of energy flowing in, out and through us all.
“Recording levels all good and ready to go,” announced Michael, breaking my reverie.
“So this water I’m drinking might once have been part of a dinosaur,” I murmured.
“That met his end when a giant iceberg signalled the beginning of the Ice Age,” said Phyllis.
Or maybe she didn’t, but it’s a good way to end the story. And as for Phyllis’s story, you’ll hear that when you listen to this Friday’s new podcast, episode 36 of The Dream Show.
You might also enjoy
Online learning at your pace
Listen to The Dream Show