Seashore
Image Courtesy of Jim Burklo
When life crawled onto the sand out of the sea, it brought a share of the magnesium in the ocean, at 1200 parts per million, with it. And then, at a certain point in the evolutionary process, the human body, with its roughly 25 grams of magnesium, began to devise ways of extracting the metal from its primordial source.
At this point in my developmental cycle, my magnesium, along with the rest of me, ponders its elemental role in the way my life has turned out.
My relationship with magnesium began at my conception, in Los Gatos, California, where my parents lived at the time. In my mother’s womb, I floated in a simulacrum of seawater.
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When I was five years old, our family moved to the Midwest, where Dad had a job in the steel industry. Dad worked as an engineer at a factory that made refractory bricks and mortar used to line the inside of blast furnaces. One of the critical components was magnesium.
When Dad announced the move, in so many words I responded: “How soon can we go?” My magnesium was powerfully attracted to the water from which it came.
Two weeks later I stood on the sand and gazed in wonderment at the Pacific Ocean, surging and receding on the shining beach. Magnesium in awe of magnesium.
Without magnesium, I would not be writing about magnesium. Without magnesium, I would not be a Californian. Without magnesium, I would not be here, or anywhere, at all.
My relationship to magnesium is a fractal dimension of the universe’s relationship to itself. The universe has unfolded over billions of years in such a way that, at least here and at least now, it has developed self-consciousness... through us. The noble purpose of our existence is to admire the cosmos with holy awe – through all our constituent elements....