Search results matching tags 'life' and 'love'

Distracted

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:31:00 GMT

I lost a friend this week, a strong woman who once jumped out of airplanes to fight forest fires, and lost her fight with some vagrant cells after a long, long battle.

None of us are permanent, of course, a flippant statement when one is healthy.

She's dead, I'm still here.

That won't always be true for me. Nor you. Nor our students.

***

I took a walk today and saw gannets crashing headfirst into the bay. Their wings fluoresced against the gray March sky. Some folks believe that gannets go blind from their forceful foraging. I used to believe this, too.

I am easily confused by words, and trust them far more than the trust they earn. Most literate folks do.

The edge of the sea defies words, and will continue to defy words, and so long as words are mere symbols (which is all they'll ever be), this will be true. The edge of the sea defies recorded images, recorded sounds. I walk along its edge several times a week, and every time it surprises me.

Our problem is not so much our inability to train our lambs to manipulate the abstract, though that is a necessary skill for anyone landless who wants to survive in our culture. Our problem is that we forget that the abstract is dependent on the world.

Global is abstract. Core standards is abstract. God is abstract. Country is abstract.

A mudflat in March, the aroma of dead critters mixed with the milt marking those who will replace them, cannot be captured by our imagination, never mind our words. What's real exceeds what we know.

The abstract matters, of course, but is utterly dependent on the real. Death does us a favor by reminding us of this. Every time I lose a friend I briefly become a better teacher.

Then I forget.

I'm fine, I'm always fine....

Keep Breathing

Anonymous — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:17:00 GMT

The storm is coming but i don't mind.
People are dying, i close my blinds.

All that i know is i'm breathing now.

I want to change the world...instead i sleep.
I want to believe in more than you and me.

But all that i know is i'm breathing.
All i can do is keep breathing.
All we can do is keep breathing now.

All that i know is i'm breathing.
All i can do is keep breathing.
All we can do is keep breathing now.

All we can do is keep breathing
All we can do is keep breathing
All we can do is keep breathing
All we can do is keep breathing.
All we can do is keep breathing now.

Keep Breathing, Ingrid Michaelson, 2003

5 Hobbies in a Hat

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 22:04:00 GMT

I don't talk a lot about my boyfriend on here (intentionally) but he really is very good for me. Something he suggested earlier (along with blowing up the TV) really stuck with me.

Aaron was curious what would happen if I took a week and, instead of watching TV, I took that time and really threw myself into something. He asked me if there was something I have never tried before that I really wanted to do. Well, not that I can think of... but there are things I used to do that I have been putting on the back burner.

Because of this, Aaron suggested I write down 5 of my long-lost hobbies and put them in a hat. I will pick one and then for the next week I will focus all my free time on that hobby. No TV. Probably no Facebook. Limited Words with Friends.

Ok, so my 5 "hobbies" are: Creating my own art, working out, scrapbooking, reading, and organizing my living space. Sure, you can say working out and organizing really aren't hobbies, but I need both! Blogging is a hobby, too, but I've been doing well with it this year.

And the winner is...

Reading! It's going to be a peaceful week. :)

On balance

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 11:08:00 GMT

Theology alert--feel free to jump in....
This was inspired by Father Sean and Brother John and the Reverend Scott.

Balance.

We need balance in our lives. Overwhelmed? Seek balance.

An innocuous philosophy--who could possibly be against balance?

A madman in the back wildy waves hand--and (again) I get sent out of the classroom.

***

The light is failing. Local carbon dioxide levels will rise until late May now, when resurrected plants start reconstructing the molecules back into something we can use again next winter. CO₂ and H₂O, carefully bonded back together into strawberries in June, peaches in July, corn in August, wheat in the September...little left now but the kale and the Brussels sprouts.

Breathe on your hand--you can feel the moisture, the breeze of molecules brushing your hand.

If God can be found, She will be found in the chloroplast, Her heart made of rubisco, the enzyme that puts us together, the most common protein in our known universe. She carefully holds a tiny molecule of carbon dioxide, three atoms of nothing, and glues them to life.

Heart of God?

She takes her life, her energy from the sun. Three times a second, another molecule of CO2 pressed together to a molecule of life, over and over and over again.

Rubisco is everywhere, in every green leaf, and as the leaves of summer fade into fall's glory, She leaves us. We start to drown in our own CO2, waiting for Her return, as She has, as She will. (That's called faith.)

***

You cannot balance a lifetime. You can dance, jump for joy, cringe in fear, curl up, scream, love or hate. There is no balance for love, for fear.

A well lived life is not one where you've balanced your fears with your joys, your love with your hate.

A "well lived" life makes no sense. You cannot "lived"--you can only live, now, this moment. Either the amygdala or the cortex rules a moment. We pretend we can string together moments, we hold on to memories, to words, to pictures, to myths of eternity, and we miss the obvious.

The here and now.

And we wonder why it's hard to teach children in a classroom....

***

A couple of soldier flies erupted from our class terrarium last week. Unexpected. Large critters crawled out of the thin litter layering the glass bottom. The yellow bar splashed on their legs with their waspish wings and fluttering antennae screamed danger. My cortex knows they're harmless, my amygdala makes my fingers stutter when I pick one up.

The last few days a half dozen more came from the same dirt.

When I opened the top to feed my sowbugs yesterday, two flew out and headed for the window. They only live a day or two as adults, and they had been trapped for hours in the terrarium. They flew fiercely, full of desire, and crashed right into the glass.

Instinct, true. Fixed action patterns with proximate and ultimate causes. Memorize this, children, pay $87, and earn your AP Biology credit.

We never speak of desire in other creatures. Of wants. Of needs.

The soldier fly carcasses will sit on the sill until my students return on Monday. I will ask them how they got there. Then I will ask why.

We all need what rubisco gets us--we all feel desire. It's why we burn our energy even though we know December's coming.

***

וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה׃

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.

We think we're sophisticated and learned and (the worst conceit of the three) immortal. We gorge on the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and forget that we are closer to the soldier flies than we are to rubisco.

I do not know who wrote the Hebew Bible, and I do not know which of the 47 men chosen by King James translated Genesis 2:7, but there's been a huge misinterpretation of "soul" in the last few hundred years.

The soul, at least according to the Words allegedly governing the actions of the dangerously powerful here in the States, is not separate from the dirt. Our "stuff," the polymers of proteins, our layers of lipids, our DNA, our essence, is our soul.

We are mortal and finite. We are living souls, dependent on rubisco, dependent on unimaginable events in the heart of the sun, hydrogen to fusion, mass to light.

You want your children ready for the world of humans, raise them under artifical light. Keep them planted in front of monitors. Feed them impossibly perfect fruit. Keep them shod. Pump them full of music made by machines. Surround them with images of the "perfect" human, and demand they become one.

Don't talk to me about balance.

We are training our children to avoid the window pane, to stay safe, to gaze at the world outside, to create stronger panes. We don't want to see them hurt. We cannot imagine their last agonal breaths.

Me? I want my children to crash into the glass, and if they're bloodied lying on the sill, to get up and crash into it again. Again and again and again.

3 billion years of desire got us to here; a few hundred years of playing God has reduced us chasing photons on screens, practicing religion disconnected from the wiser elders who wrote texts we refuse to read, to believing we are in control.

I may be unhinged, but I am not as unbalanced as anyone who believes in balance.

The sun that sustains me has been dropping lower into the sky day by day, the plants that feed me have lost their leaves, the bees I adore have gone. I am a man of science, I have a good idea why this is so.

I am also a man of faith--faith that the sunlight will return, and that rubisco will return with it come spring.

Photos are mine and Leslie's.
The rubisco model is from Wikipedia, and is in the public domain.

Science snob

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:44:00 GMT

This one's for me. No need to read it, nothing to see. Move along, move along....

Everywhere plants
Flourish among graves,

Sinking their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead.

Seamus Heaney, from "A Herbal"

I believe, truly believe, that if you pay attention, real attention, to anything, you cannot help but be smitten by Seamus Heaney, soil, or horseshoe crabs.

Or smitten by any number of the seemingly infinite variety of life and circumstance around us.

So call me a snob. A science snob.

***

Yesterday I found two new "wasps" in my roly-poly terrarium. Then I stumbled upon Seamus Heaney's latest book, Human Chain, while warming up in the Montclair Book ~~Store~~ Center. I bought it.

Last night I saw Michael Franti. Hugged him, even. He reminds me why this human thing rocks.

Stared at morning glories at noon, flared open in the dying October light. Our brains tell us that daylight is daylight. The morning glories say otherwise.

Today I got to kick leaves with my toes on the Green.

I chatted with a new security guard at school--turns out I was her doc way back when when the big blue bus visited her neighborhood.

Then I learned that my black wasps were really harmless soldier flies--I got this from The Dirt on Soil, one of my favorite blogs.

All in 24 hours. None of this expected, none of it earned.

The soldier fly on the finger photo from Rock Hill High School, via The Dirt on Soil blog.
The morning glory is mine.

Leslie babysat Seamus' kids over 30 years ago.
Funny how that goes.

Death in a classroom

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:47:00 GMT

Is part of a public education reminding a child of her mortality?
And if so, would the task fall upon the biology teacher?

It's not a trivial matter. For all the posturing by folks at the national level about our record college enrollment rates, almost a third of graduating high school senior do not go. Many of those that do go are going to juice up their resumes more than their minds.

Would teaching mortality produce a more thoughtful citizenry?

***

All of this, whatever this this is, cannot last for any individual. The oldest known bacteria survived 250 million years, the oldest plant a mere 43,000 years. We tend to think of ourselves as special, a gift (or curse) of our consciousness.

The oldest animal? Maybe the clam--a quahog made it for 405 years. Alas, it was killed by the same scientists who marked its age.

Oldest conscious animal?

A 211 year old bowhead whale leads the list, roaming this Earth since John Adams was President, finally felled by an Inuit.

And good westerners that we are, we oooh and awwww at the record, imagining a life triple life span we have, again forgetting that we truly only live in moments.

How many Saturdays do you have left in a lifetime?

Would folks behave differently if they accepted mortality, accepted limits? Would we be braver? Would we spend hours inside manipulating artificial universes? Would we accept the culture we have?

***

We are all, in a sense, immortal, or at least as immortal as life on Earth. We all share ancestors. We all come from single celled organisms that continues the spark of life for billions of years, long enough for consciousness to develop.

Or maybe consciousness has been around much longer than we know. Bacteria talk to each other.

Dying, I suspect, is a big deal. It doesn't require a whole lot of practice, and just about every one of us will manage to accomplish it whether or not we have graduate degrees, but still, for each of us, it's the end of a universe (at least among the empiricists).

To be fair, I'm a bit warped. I grew up Oirish Catholic, I practiced medicine in the inner city when poor kids were doing their best to die from AIDS before the middle class even heard of it, and I've lost enough people to accept that maybe, just maybe, this death thing is permanent.

***

We relegate death to religion, and otherwise make it taboo. But we all face it.

Biology is literally the study of life--and life is defined by death, the ultimate limit for those of us who pretend to be conscious. A culture that recognizes limits has a chance to be sustainable.

A chance.

Just a chance. Which is more than we have now.....

The skull is from wikipedia, credited to Bernard Bill5
I've watched a lot of people die, most of them young--you will, too.

Ain't Bonnie Bassler wonderful?

NYC

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:34:00 GMT

Planting time

Anonymous — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:30:00 GMT

May.
May light.
May life.

This morning I brushed my hair, as I do every morning--on the brush was the usual mix of my hair and Leslie's. We have been together a long time.

When I pull the roots of a live plant, there's is a resilience, a resistance. Dead roots rip like paper.

The hair on our brush feels more like paper these days--gray paper. Science is about what we can know. Getting older is about recognizing what we cannot know.

***

I planted today, and a wizened robin watched me as I dug holes for tomatoes and basil. The robin feasted on the worms I shoved to the surface. The pale blue eggs in its nest are now insatiable mouths, begging to be fed. The worm dies so the babies may live.

I saw two gulls peck at a freshly dead horseshoe crab today, less than an hour ago. She was huge, perhaps a couple of decades old. She had lain millions of eggs in her lifetime, and now she's dead.

I saw an angler pull up a horseshoe crab today, less than two hours ago. He spoke, I think, Russian, and a little English. His daughter splashed in the bay as he untangled the horseshoe crab in his line.

"OK eat?"
Alas, no--tastes muddy....

I doubt he understood my words, but he knew my tone. I returned the creature to the bay, but not before I showed his daughter it could not hurt me, nor her.

***

Tonight we will eat the flesh of fluke, caught last year. The last thing it tasted was a killie fish, dying on a hook.

We will eat last year's basil, now pesto, grown in soil fed by the compost.

We keep eating and living and loving, but our hair keeps graying, becoming more brittle, as we wander to our eventual end. All of us. So others may live.

How do you teach biology and remain silent?

Apropos nothing....

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:49:00 GMT

Yes, I know I'm going to *** in a purple basket
'Least I'll be in another world while you're pissing on my casket...

Leslie likes this, and now I do, too. I woke up with it in my head.

Take all your fears, pretend they're all true
Take all your plans, pretend they fell through
But that's what it's like...
That's what it's like for most people in this world.

Not sure if it's Casablanca's Johnny Cash voice, his bubblegum pop riffs, or the Oirish (and universal) themes of death and redemption (sort of), but it captures the madness of light and love.

Give up the Funk

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:31:00 GMT

My boyfriend's last name is "Funk." My kids know this, so every time he comes up in conversation (which would be every second of the day if they got their way) someone starts singing this. I may make it my theme song.