..earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground..
Micrometeorite dust can bury you, too, if you wait: a ton falls on earth every hour.
Quick: Why aren’t you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.
~Annie Dillard from For the Time Being
I conveniently thought dust came from flakes of old dead skin innocuously loosening and lazily floating away from their body of origin to accumulate on the piano, or book shelves, or hide innocently in surreptitious dust-bunny clumps under the bed. Each house is it’s own self-sustaining dust-factory thanks to its exfoliating occupants. I hadn’t given too much thought to all that alien dust outside our doors, much of it originating from something quite extraterrestial.
A mega-ton meteor comes roaring out of the sky, breaking sound barriers and everything around, including people, and busts into millions of microscopic particles on impact. Now that is real DUST, overwhelming dust, a beyond-our-comprehension debris burying us from above with shock and awe brightness.
We dust compulsively in our daily lives, trying to forestall our ultimate burial, hoping to avoid the harsh reality of being covered up only to become dust ourselves someday — all dust and nothing but dust.
Truly, in one fell swoop, we will all be changed, in a blink of any eye. A little meteor exploding from the heavens is nothing compared to the cataclysm of the Son of Man hung, dying, buried, to be returned to dust like us all, and yet rising to walk again. Instead he dusts us up, shines us clean, and readies us to live when he comes again.
No more dead skin to forestall. We will be so much more than mere dust.
Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.
~ W. B. Yeats
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
~ Virginia Woolf
Barnstorming 