Carl Sagan wrote that we are made of starstuff — that the iron in our blood was forged in the cores of dying stars billions of years before the Earth existed. I have been thinking about this for about fifteen years and I am not finished thinking about it yet.
There is a particular comfort in deep time that took me a long time to find. It used to feel annihilating — the scale of the universe, the brevity of a human life measured against it. Thirteen-point-eight billion years. One hundred years, if we're lucky and stubborn. The math seemed cruel.
Then something shifted. I started to understand that the scale isn't the point. The fact that I am here at all — that the universe arranged itself into a configuration capable of noticing itself — that is the astonishing thing. Not a tragedy. A miracle wearing the costume of statistics.
Robert Sapolsky writes about this too, from a different angle — the way human behavior is simultaneously the product of biology, chemistry, neurology, evolution, and culture, all operating at different timescales, all intersecting in the single moment of any action. A person reaching for a glass of water is a billion years of evolutionary history and a childhood and a morning's worth of cortisol all arriving at the same gesture.
I find this deeply comforting. Not reductive — the opposite. Complexity compounded on complexity, all the way down.
When I make a piece, I am usually thinking about some version of this — the way objects carry time. A bone is not just the remnant of a living thing. It is the record of millions of years of vertebrate evolution. The moth behind the clock face has been flying for a hundred and fifty million years. The clockwork was made last century by hands that are dust now.
Put them together in a frame and you are not making a decoration. You are making a map of time at different scales, all compressed into a single object that fits on a shelf.
The death's head hawk moth — Acherontia atropos — is named for Atropos, the fate who cuts the thread of life. It has been associated with death and the supernatural for centuries. It also makes a sound when disturbed, a squeak produced by forcing air through its proboscis. It is the only moth that does this.
The skull marking on its thorax is not paint. It is the pattern of scales the moth grew as it developed, shaped by millions of years of selection pressure into something that looks, to a human eye, exactly like a human skull. Evolution arrived at memento mori before humans did.
This is what I am always circling back to. Not the death part — everyone notices the death part. The vivere part. The remembering that you are alive part.
Deep time teaches the same lesson that ritual teaches — that the individual moment matters most when it is held inside the largest possible context. A candle flame is unremarkable until you understand that fire is four hundred thousand years old in human hands, that every flame is descended from every flame that came before it in an unbroken chain.
Then it is not a candle. It is an inheritance.
I am still not finished thinking about this. I expect I will still be thinking about it in fifteen more years, in whatever form that thinking takes. This feels correct. The questions worth asking are not the ones with answers. They are the ones that keep opening.