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Your journey as a dying star; spirituality in poetry

Your journey as a dying star; spirituality in poetry

Last updated on: February 16, 2024 at 1:17 pm by Melissa Ingoldsby

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Your journey as a dying star; spirituality in poetry 2024-02-16T13:17:51-05:00 Melissa Ingoldsby

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Expressing the spiritual journey of life and death through poetry and science

I have always been incredibly fascinated by space and nature. The truly inconceivable scope of how much space encompasses our universe is truly a fascinating mystery. This journey is linked to true scientific research and facts I have researched, with my own poetic flair to create a new perspective and tone.

I wrote this piece to express my feelings of such an immense power, such as a star, to process humanity and their own fragile mortality. By putting yourself in the perspective of a star, it’s birth and life and death, I hope to find a catharsis and deeper appreciation for life and death in all forms. I hope you enjoy it.

Poetic journey of a dying star: the birth

Imagine yourself in a deep part of space. You are in the Milky Way, the hazy band of light, a barred spiral galaxy that has up to four hundred billion stars, all of which cannot be seen individually by the naked eye.

It’s dark, with brief inklings of light, and silent. It is calm.

You are a Star.

But, you are a very old Star. Millions of years old.

And, it’s time to go.

You remember when you were born, under a cloud of dust and gas.

Delete

(New star being created)

It collapsed under the weight of gravity, where atoms of light were compressed enough for your nuclei to undergo fusion.

The Star’s journey into death

But, now that it’s time to go. You aren’t sad, because once you go, other things can take your place.

Other Stars.

Beautiful, brilliant things that are heavy and that can reach all over the universe.

First, two atoms of hydrogen combine. The element deuterium is combined with tritium.

Helium is created inside of you when this reaction occurs. It’s bouncy and it feels weird.

Now, the fusion that has been created inside of your core has the potential to be an inexhaustible source of energy.

Now, everything is very hot. A giant red branch is seen and the gravitational waves are very strong. The gravity is forged by the Sun and the Stars.

Now you are at peak temperatures: 100 Million degrees. Totally normal for the circumstances as the atoms of hydrogen are now ionized.

Nuclear fusion has kept you running for millions of years, now it’s run its course.

Now the last process of nucleosynthesis has begun.

You might end up being a White Drawf, a Neutron Star, or a black hole.

But, what you really want is to create gold.

To be able to hurtle it somewhere far away, to have something or someone out there find it… to appreciate it.

Wow. That would be something special.

The constricting force between the nuclei is suddenly overcome by the crushing force of gravity.

The core of your very soul recoils as your heart is in the throes of a blast of a shock wave…

And then the luminous explosion.

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The Rebirth; a new beginning

As another strong shockwave is met with your finality, your outer layer is heated to fuse and form new elements—and radioactive isotopes.

Another shockwave, and yes, with your last bit of awareness*, you did it.*

You made gold.

Delete

You imagine music surrounding all of space. It sounds like a lot of things mixed together. Warbling and crooning. Almost as if it were something connecting you to another planet, a mysterious one.

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And the last shockwave sent it out, hurtled outward to space, to new places.

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To a red planet with frozen water.

And a blue and green one, with lots of water.

Hopefully, it’ll be something even more precious to someone than it was for you to create it.

Ethereal sounds escape into the atmosphere, and like the Ancient Greek Phoenix, you are now reborn.

Delete

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Facts about Supernovae:

*Supernovae can hurtle multiple solar masses of matter several percentages above the speed of light.

*Supernovae might produce gravitational waves, though thus far, gravitational waves have been detected only from the mergers of black holes and neutron stars.

*According to Business Insider, the recreation of the process of Supernovae is used in special nuclear reactors to build new atoms, such as plutonium for nuclear weapons. But, it cannot compare to the actual merging of neutron stars.

The gold forged alone is worth about 100 octillion dollars at today’s market price, according to Metzger, or $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 written out (1 followed by 29 zeroes).

Reference for facts:

1: here

2: here

Also shameless plug: In my short story, Chameleon, the process of Supernovae is manipulated by a space and sea creature who helps a girl on earth, giving her poor family gold from the results of a dying star. Please check it out!

About Melissa Ingoldsby

Melissa Ingoldsby is a published author of the crime drama novel The Half Paper Moon and the horror/romance novel I am Bexley. She lives in the Saint Louis region and is a boy mom of three, with many different publications of poetry, novels and short stories on the online platform Vocal, Patheos, Amazon, Resurgence Novels, and Golden Storyline Books. She enjoys film, animation, art and literature of many varieties, including horror, science-fiction, fantasy, romance, dark comedy, entomology and non-fiction. You can read more about the author here.

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