This painting encompasses the overwhelming sense of gratitude I feel toward life.

I take comfort in my impermanence, revel in it. I'm a speck in space and time, insignificant and ephemeral. the grand machinations of the cosmos don’t care about me.

13.8 billion years ago, all the antimatter created by the big bang combined with and annihilated the matter, leaving behind only one-billionth of the original matter created. That one-billionth is everything we know. Then when our solar system formed, the sun, with its huge gravitational pull, consumed more than 99 percent of all the available matter. If the earth were just slightly closer to or further from the sun, the conditions for life wouldn’t be possible.

Sometimes I wonder: is basking in the absurdity of probability, in an ineffable cosmic gratitude, that different from believing in a higher power? Is being awed by wave-particle duality and space-time relativity and dark matter that different from worshipping the divine?