the path

•

It is said that Thoreau carried two notebooks with him when he walked around his beloved New England. One notebook was to record things he saw in nature and the other for the poetry he was inspired to write. There were times when he encountered something that thrilled him so, he wouldn't know which notebook to record it in. In other words, nature itself is sheer poetry.

Flash forward 150 years to Chet Raymo, retired physics and astronomy professor at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. Born in my home state, in Chattanooga, he left Tennessee to peruse the universe. I first discovered him through his 1985 book Soul of the Night: An Astronomical Pilgrimage.

But Raymo is equally poetic and proficient and powerful in describing the universe inside us all.

“We have, it seems, a fierce attraction for spirits: auras, angels, poltergeists, disembodied souls, out-of-body experiences….If we want more than meets the eye, we should practice on this: the invisible flame of DNA.

“Even as I stand motionless and attentive at the edge of the water meadow, a flurry of activity is going on in every cell of my body. Tiny protein-based “motors” crawl along the stands of DNA, transcribing the code into single-strand RNA molecules, which in turn provide the templates for building the many proteins that are my body’s warp and weft. Other proteins help pack DNA neatly into the nuclei of cells and maintain the tidy chromosome structures. Still other protein-based motors are busily at work untying knots that form in DNA as it is unpacked in the nucleus of a cell and copied during cell division. Others are in charge of quality control, checking for accuracy and repairing errors. Working, spinning, weaving, winding, unwinding, patching, repairing—each cell is like a bustling factory of a thousand workers. A trillion cells in my body are humming with the business of life. And not just in my body. The frogs singing from their hiding places—their cells are in a flurry, too. The mallards paddle-wheeling through the flooded grass. The gelatinous scum of frog eggs at the water’s edge. All of it invisibly astir. The more one thinks about it, the more unbelievable it sounds.

"Oscar Wilde said “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” The smallest insect is more worthy of our astonishment than a thousand sprites or ghosts.

"To say that it is all chemistry doesn’t demean the dignity of life; rather, it suggests that the most elemental fabric of the world is charged with potentialities of a most spectacular sort. We have perhaps an infinite amount yet to learn about the molecular chemistry of life, but what we have already learned stands as one of the grandest and most dignified achievements of human curiosity. Forget all the other stuff—the spooks, the auras, the disembodied souls; embodied soul is what really matters. As I stand by the water meadow, I try to refocus my attention away from the ducks and geese and trees and frogs (and human observer), and attend instead to the thing I cannot see but know to be there, the endlessly active, architecturally simple unity of life—the meadow aflame, burning, burning.”


- Indeed, the meadow aflame, burning, burning. From Raymo's The Path published in 2003.

•