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Covid19 Journey Day 36

April 26,2020

Today’s idea – Small is beautiful and indomitable. Here’s my point!  The first organisms to make a life on this planet were microbial and viral; their species are still here.  Their populations have thrived out of billions of evolutionary years beyond ours. Give them an apocalyptic catastrophe, and they might go dormant for a few moments or a few centuries (which are moments in geologic time) then… mutate. They are the birthplace of multicellular evolution.  Bigger is more vulnerable. Out of the last mass extinction straddling the Cretaceous- Tertiary period, sixty-five million years ago, the mighty dinosaurs did not survive but a scrappy little burrowing mammal did; and the odds are that she was our crisis progenitor.  I’m trying not to feel unduly vulnerable as I am looking at my large, decadent life, earnestly calculating how to pare things down, how to shrink my economy and my footprint.  Sitting under a naked canopy of forest, thinking about photosynthesis, I reminisce on the primal aha I was consumed with when I first made fire with a bow and drill. I wonder if the initial alchemy of air and sunlight triggered in a phytoplankton similar emotion.  It is one of the many things to admire in oak and cedar. They require so little and do so much, rending goods and services to their neighbors. A generosity that does not see a tree as separate and apart.   And as I recall, it is the most minuscule of symbionts that incrementally facilitate that magnificence and bounty.  Smallest is the grandmothers of us all.


Today’s observation – I have brought some of our campus-bound students to a big county park, one hundred and twenty-eight areas big.  These are city kids from Vietnam.  The wide-open trail system has given them an excellent new experience and navigational challenge.  After doing a general orientation for the trail maps and markers, I walked away, telling them we’d meet back at the van in an hour or so.  I was proud of the mettle of their initiative to explore a place exotic in all ways to them – their adventure in a foreign land.  I was happy to continue my casual survey of the emergent greening of southeast Iowa woods.  Today trout lilies were blooming, white, and larger than their yellow cousins of the Cumberland Plateau.   Families with children were everywhere, even in Glynis Creek, flowing through the park.  I eavesdropped on kids, unfamiliar and uncomfortable with woods roaming and just being in unstructured outside time for more than a few minutes; “we will be back to our car very soon,” I heard parents assure the fretful novitiates. The kids returned to the vans after almost two hours and I commended them. We sat by a small lake and listened to a tide of toad song rising from the woods. A trail angel walked up to us as I was rifling through my backpack for the third time, with the van keys that I’d dropped on the trail. He connected the school key fob with the logo on the side of our van. It was a good afternoon.

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