Yuletide daphnia

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

Jane Kenyon, from "Happiness"

Daphnia!

My glass kettle of pond water sits on the windowsill, where it has for years. Were I an empiricist, I'd have deduced years ago that life springs spontaneously from water and light. Thankfully, I'm a 21st century mythologist, and glibly accept what others tell me.

It's the secret to success in my field.

***

It's easy to get cranky during Christmas. We have words, which tailor our memories, and our culture focuses on what we don't. Our economy depends on this.

We run and run and run and run and run, chasing what?

If we cannot grasp the cycles at the solstice, we are lost.
If we cannot feel the daylight shift, shadows changing, we are lost.
If we cannot take the time to share our stories with our families, with others, we are lost.

I saw an exuberant daphnia swim as the setting sun shed a ray through the tank. I waited a minute, then another. Another daphnia.

In a week or two, I may have hundreds, or thousands.

***

Daphnia can reproduce without sex. When life's fine, the females can clone themselves in a reproductive frenzy.

When things get a little tougher, the males appear. Sex begets variety. When things are good again, the males die out. Males are more trouble than they're worth when things are good.

This all happens in a 5 gallon tank that's been sitting on my sill for years.

I don't know what kind of lessons this teaches, but it does make Wall Street seem a bit silly.

***

I teach for a lot of reasons, and many of them are important, I think hope, but the primary reason I teach is pure selfishness.

How much time do you spend with young adults?

They're energetic, bright, skeptical, bundles of joy. That they continue to come to school, every day, no matter what nonsense awaits them, speaks to their optimism.

I'm no Pollyanna. Pediatrics teaches even the giddiest docs that much of life is phenomenally unfair. You try pumping adriamycin, big red, into the veins of a child, knowing you're destroying much of a child in hopes of destroying all of a tumor. I know what it is to kill hope. I left medicine, but the shadows of dead and dying children have not left me.

Still, my students skirt around ideas like daphnia in the solstice sunlight.

None of us knows why we like to dance anymore than the daphnia I watch jitterbugging in the dusk's light. Few of us dare ask. Fewer dare dance.

Humans have celebrated the return of the light for thousands of years.

Take a few moments to watch a starling, a squirrel, a sparrow, a daphnia. We share the same chemistry, the same dependence on light, and (I suspect) the same joy. Let the lights and the music and the joy wash over you.

Happy First Day of Winter. Merry Yule! The crocuses will be breaking through the earth in two months.

Until then, I'll share my joy with the daphnia and anything else that has a beating heart.

Photo from the Daphnia Genetics Consortium, Indiana University

Death of a daphnia

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

John Keats, "This Living Hand"

A couple of days ago, I slid a daphnia, a water flea, under a cover slip and peeked at it under the microscope. You could see its antennae sweep the water, its eyes, even its frantic heart beat through its translucent body.

After a bit of time, the heart slowed, maybe hypoxia, maybe exhaustion, time to put it back.

The daphnia came from a jug of water that has sat on the windowsill for over two years now, a jar with elodea and translucent snails and some odd jelly-like organism sticking to the side.

Daphnia reproduce every few weeks--over 20 generations have passed their lives in this bottle, their universe.

While trying to put the daphnia back in the jug, I screwed up--the daphnia stuck to the cover glass, and as I tried to coax it into the water, I squished it.

No one else noticed the death. I'm a loon--I spent hours pondering it.

***

I come from a clan of loons. We travel, we bark, we dance, we live. Mary Beth made friends in the Hunza Valley of Pakistan, and saw a valley of bonfires during an Ismaili Muslim celebration. John tackled a 20/20 cameraman, and got a spot on The Daily Show with John Stewart, and Marnie holds center court no matter where we go, and may be the funniest person on this planet.

I'm the wallflower, and I'm no slouch.

My mom was talented and crazy, but most of all, she was Oirish enough to remind us daily, hourly, that we are mortal. She gave up a shot at the professional stage to raise us, but we were audience enough. She loved us to death.

Death.

We live in a culture that denies it.

If a child learns anything in biology class, she ought to learn that in the end, death is as relentless as life, and life as relentless as death.

***

Our own death remains unknowable, of course, and I fear it in proportion to my love of life. Still, I saw both my parents finally give in to long illnesses, and both laughed, laughed, in their final moments of consciousness.

Not sarcastically, not smirkingly, not even ironically. They both laughed joyously. Neither believed in heaven, and both prayed there was no hell. Their faith was in the herenow.

Faith has no place in science class, but mystery does. Science is about pushing the borders of what we can know.

I know the daphnia I observed under the scope had some sense of awareness. I know the sun provides plant with the energy that keeps me alive. On rare, too rare, occasions I know that I will die.

And on those days I remember this, moments clarify, and joy deepens, not for what I will lose, but for what I have. In a culture that teaches children to fear their own shadows, I hope to show them the ultimate shadow, the inexplicable end that puts things in perspective.

Dozens of daphnia still dance in the windowsill jug, eating, seeing, being.

I want my students to have daphnia moments.

The Daphnia photo is by Paul Hebert at the Public Library of Science, via wikimedia.