Hi there! I'm new too. Where in Cali? I grew up in the central valley. Sure do miss it, especially now that I live in the land of the never ending rain.
We are are part of nature, built from the same stuff as stars, planets, asteroids, and comets. Our protons and neutrons have been around since the earliest times, glued together into heavy elements of long dead ancient suns, blasted out into the universe and resculpted from diffuse interstellar dust clouds by the gentle hand of gravity. When the pattern of atoms known to be you ceases to be, the building blocks will return to the voids of space, and in a billion years or more, they may take their place in another structure so beautiful that a future mind may perceive it to be the work of a god. ~ Brian Cox