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The Wordsworth poem reminds me that we are all made of ‘star dust’. We’re made of exactly the same atoms as everything else in the universe. These atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium were created millions and billions of years ago in the nuclear furnaces of massive, exploding stars, and hurled out into the surrounding space eventually to become new solar systems, circling planets and people like you and me. Only through the death of the old has come the life of the new.

The Mud Maid sculpture, a sleeping woman, is located in ‘The Lost Gardens of Heligan’, in Cornwall, the artists being brother and sister Sue and Pete Hill. Eternal life, for me, is the life of the Cosmos. As it says in the Book of Genesis, out of dust I was made, and to that same dust I’ll return, “rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.” Death is not about going nowhere, but becoming re-absorbed into everywhere for all time. Unlike dying, death itself need hold no terrors. In the endless unfolding of the Cosmos, the old is reborn into the new.

What an astounding privilege to have been, even for a passing moment, a living being, blessed with this conscious awareness of the absolute magnificence and overwhelming awesomeness of that which ‘IS’.