April Showers

And Other Everyday Miracles

Convective clouds over Marys Peak, photo taken near my home, spring 2021.

On a spinning planet with a tilted axis

The northern half turns to face the central Sun

Longer days

Stronger light

Energy borne of nuclear fusion

Percolated upward through half a million miles of plasma

Radiated into space

Shining brilliantly

For ten billion years.

---

Over the wide open ocean

A thousand miles from land

Under clear skies

Water molecules absorb the energy

Light, infrared, UV

All converted into energy of molecular vibration

Heat

And they jump, by the trillions of trillions of trillions

Liquid into vapor

Nothing appears to happen

Except a slight moistening of the air

Massive amounts of energy converted, transferred

Invisibly.

---

As this moist air drifts over land

The Sun warms the ground below

Warming the air above

Warm air rises

Expanding

Cooling

Reaching the dew point

Condensing

A turbulent patchwork of updrafts and downdrafts

Popcorn clouds

Growing

Towering

Darkening

Droplets colliding

Expanding

Gaining mass

Attracted by gravity to the Earth below

Falling through the rising air

Rain!

April showers.

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Magnesium, iron, manganese, copper

Elements created in the core of long-dead stars

Condensed into a molten planet

Crystallized into rock

Weathered into sand and soil

Dissolved by April showers

Captured by roots

Carried up to leaves

To play starring roles

In the great dance of life.

---

Metal ions

Coordinated by organic molecules

Perfected over billions of years

Manganese splitting water

Releasing oxygen

Magnesium surrounded by nitrogen and carbon

Chlorophyll

Optimizing resonance

Capturing photons from the Sun

Energizing electrons

Iron and copper ferrying them

To be energized yet again

By more photons

Magnesium again

At heart of Rubisco

The most abundant protein on earth

Seven hundred million tons

Capturing carbon from the air

To become the core

Of everything living.

---

Photo-synthesis

Creation from light

Complexity from simplicity

Diversity from uniformity

Evolved 2.7 billion years ago

By humble bacteria

Changing the planet permanently

Oxygenating the atmosphere

Precipitating the iron from the oceans

Creating the ore deposits that have built our cities

Humble bacteria

Captured by a nucleated cell

The ancestor of all plants

Chloroplasts.

---

Photosynthesis

One reaction to drive them all

And in the sunlight bind them

Carbon to oxygen

To hydrogen

To nitrogen

To sulfur

To phosphorus

Sugars

Proteins

Fats

DNA

Plants

Insects

Animals

Wood

Coal

Oil

Natural gas

All ultimately created by sunlight

Captured by photosynthesis.

---

Cells sense the longer days

Warmer nights

April showers

And send signals

Expand!

Divide!

Buds bursting

Seeds germinating

Ancient programs

Evolved through hundreds of millions of years

Evolved?

Created?

Creatively evolved?

Evolvedly created?

Does it matter?

Can it not be both?

---

There is more complexity and intricacy

In a blade of grass

Than in the greatest of human machines.

---

Jet engines are marvelous designs

Feats of engineering

Machined down to the micron

And yet inside one of those blades

It is just metal

In one featureless mass

Ten million atoms thick

Doomed to wear

And eventually to fail.

---

Inside of a leaf

Is not uniform at all

A leaf is not just a factory for capturing sunlight

But also a factory for its own construction

All of the workers and machinery to build itself

And the blueprints for its own design.

---

Inside of a leaf

There are no uniform masses of anything

Each rigid-walled cell a universe unto itself

Transcribing 30,000 genes

Thirty thousand different proteins

Each with an essential function

Building structure

Moving materials

Catalyzing reactions

Creating and sustaining

The miracle of photosynthesis.

---

If each leaf has more complexity

Than a house or a business

Then the whole tree

Or the whole animal

Is more like a great city

With orchestrated flows

Of supplies

Of nutrition

Of information.

---

As the days warm

And buds burst forth

These great cities build cathedrals

Structures of beauty

Beacons of color and fragrance

With a promise of sweet nectar

Attracting other life forms

Each also with the complexity of a great city

Each coevolved over hundreds of millions of years

Bees

Wasps

Hummingbirds.

---

At the heart of these cathedrals

That we call flowers

Lie the sacred blueprints

All of the instructions to build entire cities

Packaged neatly into small sticky spheres

That we call pollen

And as the flying creatures arrive

They gather some of these spheres

And drop off others from elsewhere

To alight on the altars

Where they tunnel inward

And the blueprints fuse

Recombining

Reassorting

Exploring new possibilities.

---

And as the cathedrals collapse

These new possibilities

Begin to grow

And then stop

Locked in stasis

Suspended animation

Surrounded with future fuel

Ripening

Protected from the elements

Packaged potentialities.

---

And when even the entire cities collapse

And fade to dust

These packaged potentialities remain

Scattered to the earth

Awaiting April showers

To awaken

Sending down roots

Launching leaves into the sunlight

We call them seeds.

---

Inside our square sequestered spaces

Where we stare at our little screens

And fret about distant wars

And cast judgment on those who disagree

We peer out the window

And smile

April showers bring May flowers

We say

And perhaps we pluck a few cathedrals

To adorn our tabletops

For a few days.

---

Four billion years of coevolved wonders

Millions of species

Ourselves among them

A rocky planet

Converted into a living, ever-changing biosphere

Powered by a shining star

All just a backdrop

To our petty struggles

Our fears

Our world of abstractions

And warring narratives.

---

In these days

As the news turns dark

Step out into that backdrop

In between April showers

And look with new eyes.

---

See that warbler flitting among the new leaves

Seeking small insects?

Dendroica coronata perhaps?

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Butterbutt

He is not merely an object

A meat-robot existing by happenstance

In a universe that just happens to exist.

---

He is a city unto himself

A self-assembling marvel

Perfectly suited to fly

Thousands of miles each year

Arriving here as the buds break

To seek nourishment

To build a nest

To attract a partner

To raise the next generation of marvels

As he was himself raised

In an unbroken line

Stretching back nearly four billion years.

---

His distant ancestors were dinosaurs

And before them lizards

Then fish

Then simple sea creatures

Then single cells

Then bacteria

The same sequence that gave rise to us

We were also lizards once, and fish.

---

This backdrop that surrounds us is our heritage

Far more wondrous and complex than our greatest creations.

---

We have sought to remake the world in our image

A world of machines and objects

Subject to our will

Cities of wonder unto themselves reduced to commodities

Fields upon fields of identical corn plants

Animals packed into barns

Our own selves secure behind windows

Of homes

And cars

And planes

And spaceships.

---

We have sought to remake the world

In the glory of our own minds

Our own egos

And somehow we have found only loneliness

Isolation

Depression

Emptiness

Disappointment.

---

They say we must change now

A Great Reset

A world of dense cities

Of electric vehicles

Of centralized order

Of safety

Of control

One last attempt

Of the human ego

To impose will

Upon a chaotic and unwilling world.

---

That way lies more suffering

More loneliness

More separation

And it cannot ultimately succeed

Without acknowledging and working within

The evolved processes

That sustain life.

---

The future is not out there

In the minds of experts

With great global schemes

And each of us sequestered away

In little boxes

Projecting our minds

Into the Metaverse.

---

The future is local

Seeing the background

Remembering ourselves

As part of natural cycles

Replacing those picture-perfect lawns

With sprawling gardens

So that the land may nourish us

And we may in turn nourish the ecosystem

Of cities unto themselves

Seeking balance and participation

---

I do not believe we are in this world to transcend it

To remake it

To tame it

We cannot wage war on that which sustains us

And expect to reap joy and prosperity.

---

I believe we are in this world to participate

To experience material existence

To collaborate

To co-evolve

And springtime

Is a good time

To see with new eyes

To jump in

To sow seeds

Packaged potentialities

Of a new world.

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April showers

Awakening new life

In darkness

Unfurling new leaves

Into sunlight

Beginning cycles anew.