If you know anything about rock and roll, you are likely familiar with the Beatles' song Eleanor Rigby.  It is a paean to the forgotten people of the world, the people who live and die and no one notices, people whose death attracts virtually no notice other than those who do the funeral and burial.  And even they probably stop thinking about the death in a few days.  It's just another life, gone, a life like countless others, here today, gone tomorrow.  It's no more.
     Many years ago, I was traveling in Eastern Canada, exploring parts of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.  Although these parts of Canada attract fewer tourists than their western counterparts, they nonetheless enjoy a busy season every summer.  In some sectors of the region, however, very few people go.  It was in one of these places that I found myself one cloudy afternoon.  I was in a cemetery, a very old cemetery in the little town of Iona.  The history buffs among us may know that Iona is also the name of one of the most famous medieval British monasteries, whose monks, along with their neighbors at nearby Lindisfarne, did much to preserve the scholarship of the ancient world until the European continent emerged from its lengthy slumber of antiquity.
     I saw some very old grave markers, some hundreds of years old.  It was fascinating, really, to see how, though these markers now exist for only a very few people, they continue to preserve and remember human lives and, more broadly, existence.  Each one tells a story, a story which probably none of us will ever know.  All the lonely people, as the song goes, "Where do they all come from?"
     It's a very good question.  In a world whose origins seems more knowable yet increasingly unfathomable with each passing year, we wonder:  where do we all come from?
     Life's origins really do matter.  Do we really live in a random universe?