I spend a fair amount of time thinking about my pieces, the parts that make me who I am, and how they all come together. Recently, I was in a tube for half an hour to reveal that one piece wasn’t fitting just right with another piece. The picture of my insides consists of a bunch of tubes and rivets, pumping and charging and turning all about, to make it all stand upright and keep whirring.

Obviously, fundamentals of anatomy are mysterious to me. I understand my internal organs and their placement about as well as the geography of states between Ohio and Massachusetts. It’s all just a jumble of squished-together boundaries, my spleen perhaps just south of New Jersey.

The pieces I’m better acquainted with are those at a far more basic level. Charged particles, the raw ingredients of all matter, assemble into atoms that I imagine vibrating and bouncing about, but in systematic arrangements that construct the molecules and the cells and the organs that are so mysterious to me. These charged particles are easy enough to separate. Just rub your hair with a balloon and it’s easy to peel 100 billion charged particles, displaced momentarily until they attract others and settle back into comfortable chairs.

Notably, we’re composed of “star stuff,” famously coined by Carl Sagan. The basic particles of our universe were here from its earliest moments, but important elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen had to get forged in the bellies of stars. This is splendid in its own right, but the fact that those stars not only lived but died and then later spread their remains to be assembled into our own solar system is what gets me. This extraordinary recycling program sources fundamental pieces of organic material from within another star that has lived, died and dispersed. You’re a remaining testament to that stellar furnace, a small memorial candle to something magnificent and long past.

This is often the last line of an astronomy lecture. I’ve given this one, and students can walk away thinking about what a rich history every particle in their body has had, how our origins trace back to the depths of time and the origin of all matter. But our cycling of matter continues with each breath. Every exhale produces particles that re-form into trees, and trees from millions of years ago might now be burning as natural gas out of a stove or water heaters. You become plants; plants become you. You may be contributing to our forests, and our bodies might have remnants of some extinct dinosaur. Even if we never had a chance to think about anything beyond this planet, there’s still a poem writing itself about your interconnection to a greater world. Your pieces are its pieces. Your breath is sustained by what is around you.

Or, you are what you eat, as they say. I’ve gone so far as to suggest to students that a baby in utero could be pieced together with the combination of breathing and a diet of Doritos of the expectant mother. People squirm at this idea, and my students are quick to point out that it’s good that I don’t teach biology or health class. I agree that we are much more than a breath and some processed corn chips. Still, all that we are made of, the reassembly of air and nourishment churning away on the insides to craft a protein here and a few sugars there, these form beautiful structures that keep a skeleton, some muscles, a bit of circuitry and a bunch of salt water all together into what is me. I’m a complex arrangement built out of multitudes of very simple particles, cycled and shared.

And yet, here I am, doing my best, quite conscious of the fact that I exist and that perhaps I’ve been holding onto a few electrons since birth that I’ll call my own, at least until I have to let them back out into this shared universe. To imagine all this is pretty good for such a humble assembly of recycled particles.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah.

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