August light

This one's from two Augusts ago.

A

The days fade quickly now--in three weeks we'll have an hour less sunlight gracing us than today.

We will assault children with a sterile view of science, reduced to a method and streams of vocabulary, "ideas" we can test.

The sun slides south without notice as we huddle under the subtle, damning hum of fluorescent lights, each one filled with vaporized mercury, coated with phosphor, a steam punk amalgamation of  early 20th century technology and vision.

We talk little of either, the sun or the hum, the light of our lives.

***

Here's the heart of biology: We're matter put together in an orderly fashion by light. When light fades, we fall apart.

Follow the energy--the breath you take brings in oxygen that allows you to convert the toast you ate this morning back into carbon dioxide and water. You literally breathe out a few bites of your breakfast  by noon.

Wheat grown in our classroom

The toast, of course, is mostly wheat--these days we take out the best part of the grain and feed it to animals (flour keeps better on the shelves this way), but what's left over , is still wheat, a plant, like most plants, that combines carbon dioxide and water into marvelous strands of carbon compounds, weavers that rival Rumpelstiltskin--the miracle is in the flax, not the gold.

And yet when we talk of "photosynthesis" the kids groan under the weight of the terms: photolysis, ATP synthase, electron chain transport, chemiosmosis....sighing vast quantities of carbon dioxide molecules, drooling on the desks.

Yes!...there's your breakfast, in the sighs, in the drool!

***

The fading light is not metaphorical--it is real. Outside the classroom windows the living world is dying, as it does every fall. The hunger season is coming.

We start the school year in late summer, as we do, as our bodies, still untamed, feel the dying light. We pretend otherwise, talk of the "new year" and of "objectives" and "benchmarks"--as the sun slides slowly south, the shadows lengthen ominously, and the ice returns.

We teach children to stop paying attention to what matters, to focus on the trivial. That is how you survive in a world of concrete and glass, in a world where many of our children would not recognize their breakfast in its raw form.

Biology is the study of life--let's shine our light on what matters.

Back to school is a bittersweet time...

Breathing biology

We got beans growing in our classroom. Three gorgeous rattlesnake pods hanging from a vine, the soft purple puff of a flower between the second and third bean.

Most of the stuff that makes up these beans is carbon dioxide, much of it from the breath of all those who share ideas here in our room.

Carbon dioxide from yesterday's Pop Tarts,
Snapples, and bologna sandwiches.

Carbon dioxide that traveled through the hearts 

of every child in our class.

Carbon dioxide expelled as a sigh, 

broken down by a few brain cells that would

rather do anything but this school thing.

Carbon dioxide that is invisible and soft as a baby's breath

as real as the ancient massive maple tree 

just outside our classroom window.

Carbon dioxide children are taught to fear as "bad,"

the harbinger of catastrophic climate change.

We ruin it, this carbon dioxide communion, reducing it to hieroglyphics on a page, to be regurgitated by spilling bubbles on a sheet, a religiously messy communion of sorts sterilized to a formula:

C₆H₁₂O₆ +6 O₂  =>  6H₂O + 6CO₂

And yet, for a moment, the moment before eating the bean, a few students allow themselves the beauty and the power of the story to let them believe what they've always known to be true, that this whole life business, as messy and complicated and incomprehensible as it seems, gets down to this:

Each living thing, every living thing, shares an intimate bond that goes beyond the language of science, beyond the language of art, beyond human boundaries.

The universe belongs to all of us, as we belong to it.

No matter how we do in school, no matter what we know, now matter what we do.

I would trade all the biochemical pathways we "teach" for a child's grasping, for more than a moment, 

that we are indeed the stuff of the universe around us, and that this stuff cycles through us, is us.

Ring of Fire

Something happened about 14 billion years ago, or so our version of the story goes. Something happened, maybe from nothing, and here we are now. Someone much like me will likely be here long after I die.

That is the heart of the story. Entropy drives the drama.

I am too wrapped up in life to get hung up in existentialism--a quick peek at a patch of ground teeming with critters reminds me that rejecting anything human does not end the universe.

So while I keep trying to bring my lambs back home to the bigger story that drives science, I often fail when navigating through membranes and enzymes and all kinds of minutiae I am paid to impart.

Johnny Cash knew biology. Willie Nelson still does, and he lives it--you can fill up your truck with BioWillie Fuel.

We love for a lot of reasons, and we do not talk of love in biology for far fewer reasons, but when you get down to it, the business of spilling ourselves into others involves respiration and reproduction. Love is indeed the essence of evolution.






And all along the way, oxygen ultimately rips electrons from sweet sugar, reducing life back to water and carbon dioxide and heat, the same theme in Shakespeare's sonnets and in lurid dime novels. We're all driven by a slow form of fire.

Just ask anyone paying attention.

For the Social Distortion version, take a peek here.

My wife once walked on window ledges, I once pushed motorcycles to their limits.
We fell in love, survived anyway, and now we tell stories.

Mary Oliver wrote "Oxygen," a poem, one of my favorites.
I originally saw it in the New Yorker--you can find it here now.
(Thank you, lucychili!)