Earthly

Welcome to Arkansas, Welcome to Tennessee, Welcome to Virginia. My siblings and I would wave at every welcome sign on our annual road trip, riding in the backseat with crumbly granola bars and anticipation as we drove past fields and cities and everything in between, with more and bigger trees the closer we got to Nana and Papa’s house. We would watch the other cars driving parallel to us going who-knows-where, all zooming past us at eighty miles an hour. Eighty miles an hour felt fast but not fast enough for my kid self.

My kid self—yes, as a kid it felt like Nana and Papa lived forever away, like it took an eternity to get there. The distance and time between us seemed incalculable. But it’s not. It’s 1,300 miles, twenty hours by car. Scientists have managed to calculate distances and times between all sorts of places: from my house in Texas to Nana and Papa’s house in northern Virginia, L.A. to N.Y.C., Finland to the Philippines, the earth to the sun.

The earth to the sun—yes, scientists say that it’s about ninety-three million miles, which would be like driving from my house to Nana and Papa’s house 71,539 times, which, if you were driving at eight miles an hour, would take you 1,162,500 hours, which would be 48,438 days straight, which would be 133 years. And that’s without stopping for gas.

Gas, dust, stars—yes, scientists say the galaxy is made up of this stuff. But the galaxy is so large, so impressive, awe-inspiring even, and gas and dust are not. Gas, like in the pink helium balloons that lingered in our one-bedroom apartment in July after my baby shower, like Mom’s black stove top that turns blue and hot when I turn it on to saute onions for a baked rotini casserole. Dust, like the whitish substance that collects next to the novels on my bookshelf, like the gray debris that gets sucked up by our obnoxiously loud vacuum cleaner. Gas? Dust? How is this the stuff of the galaxy, the gods?

The gods—yes, the book of Genesis says that God said, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” and He was talking to Adam and Eve, but He was really talking to all of us—so I’m made of dust? So gas turns into stars through a process of nuclear fusion, and dust turns into humans through a process of…what? How were we created? And how long did that human-creation process take? What is God, or who, and how? Is the biblical creation story literal? Were Adam and Eve real people? And if they were real, when did God create them? Is it even possible to know? How can anyone today know what the earth was like some millions of years ago? How can anyone determine the earth’s age? How do scientists not get lost in such long numbers?

Long numbers—yes, numbers like 5,878,625,373,183, which equals one light-year, and if our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years in diameter, then that rounds up to about 5,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, which scientists rewrite as 5.9e+17 to keep track of all the zeroes.

Zeroes—yes, the shape of a 0 is a long oval making infinite loops, like biological life cycles, like the whole universe which has no beginning and no end, like that Jesus Christ who the Bible says is the beginning and the ending, like my mind circling around all its unanswerable questions. But I ask the questions anyway, and suddenly the landscape of Arkansas feels even smaller than ever, and so do I, even with all the grand gas and dust particles that make me, me, in a way that I can’t understand.

I can’t understand it, so I don’t even try, so I keep doing all the tasks that I call common or mundane, like play with my baby and make dinner and read and clean, without stopping to think about the creation and vegetation and intelligence and matter involved in those tasks, without wondering how any of it exists, without noticing that every move I make and thought I think is an explicable miracle, without realizing that even the “earthly” things are heavenly.