I’m deeply fascinated recently with the idea that life comes from life-or more realistically, life comes from death. And more personally, where did I come from? And more spiritually, have I been a cow, an insect, or a bacterium in a previous life?

If women are born with all the ova they’ll ever have, that means that half of me came from something of my grandmother’s, that she then passed on to my mother in the womb. Am I a piece of chicken? Or maybe a bean? Or a sloughed-off cell from the inside of her cheek? Or a bacterium?

And if it takes men about 74 days to mature their spermatozoa, what a fascinatingly microscopic idea that some little bit or speck that he ate was to become me . I picture a cheeseburger, or maybe some roast beef. Maybe a bit of bacon from his mother’s incredibly delicious green beans.

I realize this edges frighteningly close to the idea that I was not, in fact, delivered by stork or simple budding , but it’s somehow mind-boggling to consider all the forces and interactions and molecules and sequences that had to occur just to make me. Call it egotism or what you will, but some part of me-no, all parts of me-existed before I ever existed. Before even the concept or the thought of a me existed. In one form or another, at least. Everything’s connected to everything else.

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