The Gospel of Iron

The Gospel of

Subtitle: Which star is best?

Look down at our hands. We cannot see it but there are intricate streams of blood carrying life sustaining elements into our fingertips. With every breath, oxygen is brought into the body and pushed to the extremes by the ever-servant heart.

An essential for the transportation of oxygen is:

Iron.

Without iron — our liver, stomach, pancreas, biceps, glutes, fingers and toes would not get the oxygen that they love so much.

If iron vanished from our bodies right now, there would be immediate and catastrophic failure of multiple physiological systems, resulting in death. We would go from casually chatting about politics or the weather to permanently dead within minutes.

All that life.

Over.

Now, let’s switch sides of this thing and look at iron from the other end of the spectrum.

Let’s consider our sun.

Isn't this just the BEST star?

It is certainly a great star. It is responsible for the most enjoyable late-summer Saturday afternoons with just a patio and a lawn chair and it is single-handedly keeping every Sunglass Hut in business. I know it is a “homer” pick, but I can confidently say that our sun is my pick for "Best Sun" in the cosmos. I cannot believe we get to bask in the glory and warmth of this beautiful, local star.

But our left-brains know that we must remove this bias from the question if we want to arrive at objective truth.

So let's try to ignore our sun's role in our very existence and use size and temperature because those are objective!

It then becomes a bit disapointing that our beloved Sun is so blazingly average.

Nowhere near the biggest or the hottest.

It's also not particularly interesting or exceptional compared to its star peers. Right now, this G-type main-sequence star is doing its typical work: fusing hydrogen into helium.

Our average, local star is simply not hot enough to produce the heavier elements of life such as carbon, oxygen, or nickel.

So our sun doesn't pump any iron.

🙁

Don't worry — there was once an engine that could. And did.

And it was a BIGGER and HOTTER than our star and could even perform stellar nucleosynthesis.

The iron moving to your fingers was produced in the core of this massive star. It worked really hard. For millenniums, it fused this element together until it finally collapsed under its own gravity and exploded its metal life-seed across the face of the universe.

This dispersal of iron includes the 5 MILLIGRAMS that are currently swimming in our under-skin rivers.

Sustaining life.

Shat is the story that iron is telling?

What is the gospel of iron?

Perhaps to let go of the perception that we can hold onto objective truth in this universe.

Because it is like trying to answer a question that is not worth asking.

Like which star is best?

What a dumb question.

What a dumb question!

A better question is:

Did the stars know we would need them?

Do they give of themselves freely?

What is the story being told here?

Because blood is alive and I like to think the stars knew what they were doing.

God knew we were coming.

Love knew we were coming.

The Cosmos knew we were coming.

(pick your favorite)

Also, whenever we feel lethargic and run-down — tired, listless, lacking energy and motivation — it could be that we have an iron deficiency.

Or it could be that we have not stopped — for even a moment — to consider the sacrifice of a nameless star, that laid down its celestial body for ours.