Holy water

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W. B. Yeats
from "Among School Children"

Earth Day. Again.

For a few generations, a small slice of humans on this planet got to pretend they rose above the wilderness, the wildness. We pretend we are immortal. We hide our dead and dying.

Wheat settled yesterday for $4.99^3/4 per bushel. A penny will get you 2000 individual wheat berries.

An acre in wheat will yield about 42 bushels, gross about $210 for the farmer. The farmer pays for fertilizer, for grain, and sometimes for water. The carbon dioxide and sunlight are free.

I grew wheat once on a 20 square foot plot. It yielded about a pint of wheat berries. Cost me nothing but a handful of grain.

It's Earth Day--go scatter some wheat.

***

We eat a lot of wheat. We chew bread, break down the complex sugars to smaller parts, tiny pieces of which finally enter our cells. In our cytoplasm, the bread is broken, and even smaller pieces wander over to mitochondria. Oxygen accepts the now spent electrons, electrons initially excited by sunlight on a Kansas plain, and we recreate the holy water that initially gave up the electrons on a sunlit wheat field.

Resurrection in a water drop. The water is broken on a farmer's field, resurrected in a cell deep within my body.

I can never claim to be a reborn Christian--that implies a singular event. I've been reborn enough times to qualify as an Hindu. I'll leave the Mysteries to the theologians, but I do like our Creation stories, even if they are internally inconsistent. Good stories focus on truths, not facts.

And in the Genesis I read, our soul is made of mud. Our soul is made of breath. We are living souls, acts of creation, and temporary acts at that. We are part of something larger.

Every breath in, oxygen. Every breath out, resurrection.

***

How do you teach this, this mystery of the mitochondria, of the wheat, of water that splits and combines, then splits again, using the sun's energy, so that we can go about singing and frowning and dancing and copulating and playing and growing and, yes, dying, one generation to the next?

How do we approach the mystery from the science end? How do we teach that we are just a tiny piece of consciousness in a long dance of life, and a longer dance of energy?

And if we should ever succeed in teaching this, how will we keep the children in the classroom on a lovely, lovely April afternoon?

The drawing was lifted from the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor--
there is an annual fundraiser there in my sister's name--go enjoy yourselves!

Ironically, my sister was killed by an errant self-identified Christian missionary.