Maniacal in the Best Way

I wanted to talk about coincidence.  Since it feels like nearly everyone else has shared some of their coincidences with the class, I figure that now is as good a time as ever to stop pretending that I am not experiencing the same thing.  We have already discussed the coincidence of me running into my grandmother after my ‘big dream,’ so I’m going to skip over that one but here are some of the other others, and most of them have to do with my own writing.  Let’s just look at some of the bigger points from the last week:

 1)       The other day, Dr. Sexson said, “One never returns, one only recreates.”  This rang a bell in my mind because for the past year—or there about—I have been working on a long story called, “No Traveler Returns” the title of which is, of course, inspired by Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy wherein Hamlet describes death as “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”  Sometimes it is good to hear one’s own thoughts sound from somewhere else.

2)      This is one that has been on mind for about half of the time we have been in class.  It started when Valerie posted a blog about our position as humans amongst the cosmos.  This is something that we have returned to several times throughout the semester, and each time, I have refrained from posting a short poem that I wrote a while ago that touches on the same topic.  This isn’t a forum for grandstanding, after all.  But in the Denk piece about the Goldberg variations that we read on Thursday, we came across the line, “infinite possibility from a single piece of code.” The words “infinite possibility” struck me like the one above.  Because, again, it was very similar to something that I had once written, except I called it 'infinite improbability.'
            The Stuff of Stars
We are each billions of years old,
Flying through the cosmos,
Across distances unimaginable;
We hold the fire.
 
From piece to piece
We gain existence.
Infinite improbabilities leading
To our human collective.

We’ve been waiting,
Since the beginning of time,
To be jointed, one particle
At a time.

A smile; a heartbeat;
A warmth; a tender kiss.
Assembled by gravity,
We are the stuff of stars.