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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