You are not separate from the universe. How could you be? The whole thing worked together to give rise to you through an unbroken chain of occurrences over billions of years, and the stuff you are made of comes from the same Great Whatever as everything else. Since the dawn of life on this planet organisms have been exchanging water and other elements back and forth through eating, drinking, reproducing and dying, and you are inseparably one with that dance.

And your own elements will not die. When your incredible heart stops beating and the stuff your amazing body is made of begins to come apart, your own molecules will simply continue the dance of the elements that has been going on for billions of years.

You won't die, you'll just return. Some elements born of stardust arranged themselves on two legs, looked around, experienced countless wonders, laughed, cried, fell in love, learned and unlearned, and then changed form, like a ripple ceasing its movement and becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding water. The water remains the same — it's just doing a different dance now.

Reading by Tim Foley.