Science Archives - Live. Love. Leave.

There was a moment earlier this summer when I decided I was going to post an essay on my blog every Thursday. That was six or seven Thursdays ago, and if you’re reading this, you know how that worked out for me.

So when I woke up the other morning at 5:00, a good hour and a half before my alarm was planning to go off, it seemed like a sign. Go write an essay, the quiet dark outside seemed to be telling me. So there I was, trying to figure out the world again while Rusty and Fred slept peacefully down the hall. When I don’t write, it’s like not doing the laundry. I find myself staring at a giant pile and trying to remember how to sort it out. That’s where I am now: I’m staring at a summer’s worth of thinking and hoping I end up with all the socks in the same load.

I’ll start here. Sunday morning, my friend Margo said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” I’m imagining a pain train. It travels around the world whistling sadness according to some undecipherable schedule. When it shows up at your house, you have to get on and go where it takes you. You never know when you’ll get off or what strange country you might find yourself in or who you’ll be travelling with. Some years, it seems like you don’t even get to unpack your bags before you hear that mournful whistle approaching out of the distance.

The essay I was trying to write all summer wasn’t about pain, though. It was about those days when the train seems to be coming right at you, and then veers off. It started like this:

Not long after my mother’s funeral this past May, my brother called me from the ICU. “Well, I passed away,” he said.

You can see why I had a hard time writing the next sentence, right?

Here’s what was strange, though. In those seconds when I was trying to figure out what to say, I felt myself stepping up onto the train. I believed, it turns out, that my brother could actually call me himself to tell me he had died. In addition to grief I felt wonder. Sort of, “So this, too, is how the world is.”

Before that phone call, I’d been trying to write a different essay. That one began with the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage rights, the Confederate flag slipping down the pole, and the President singing Amazing Grace at Clementa Pinckney’s funeral. I was moved by the reactions of the men standing right behind the President. As he started to sing, a few of them seemed almost to laugh. It felt like they, too, might have been having that moment—“This too,” in the midst of all this suffering, “is how the world is.”

Both of those essay beginnings kept rattling around in my head while I tried to figure out what my point was. I stapled them together and read a draft to Fred back in mid-July. “What’s your point?” he said.

“Beats me,” I told him, and went back to not finishing it.

Then a few weeks ago we took the grandkids to see Inside Out. In the movie, where emotions are brought to life as characters inside the main character’s head, Joy is something of a jerk. She’s determined that the little girl they inhabit needs to stay happy.

I have to admit, I was on Joy’s side for most of the movie. It didn’t occur to me to question her self-righteous grasping at happiness. I admit it–I was routing for her even as she drew a tiny chalk circle and told Sadness to stay inside it and stop messing everything up (“Well, that’s kind of mean, but it’s for the best,” I remember thinking.) It took me as long as it took this pushy cartoon character in what is ostensibly a kid’s movie to realize that things wouldn’t stop falling apart until perky little Joy stopped denying Sadness. (For the record if you’ve seen the movie, I also didn’t see Bing Bong’s sacrifice coming. “But you knew he was going to—“ Cali, the seventh grader said. No, actually, No. I didn’t. I believed that Bing Bong and Joy would soar together to the top of the mountain, that “this too, is how the world is.” Even after Joy reached the top alone, I still thought he’d come back in the end somehow. Can you see why sadness throws me for a loop every time? This is why I like mindless romantic comedies and get frustrated if I read too much Ian McEwan.) And if you haven’t seen the movie, I’m sorry that none of that made any sense.

As neither of those essays seemed to be finding its way, I started a bunch of others. One of them had me thinking about a few years I spent not so long ago trying to figure out the world. In my mind then, the world was either a scary wilderness, full of booby-traps waiting to snap and clamp their ragged jaws around my ankle, or a beautiful wonderland, full of love, and mystery, and joy. The answer mattered. Choose A and the right response is to hunker down, close up, keep your heart safe. Choose B and you peel back your skin and let everything in. Neither choice appealed to me. Option A felt like defeat, and Option B felt reckless.

Back then in 2011 when even my priest suggested I should see a therapist, I finally went. As luck would have it, the woman I finally chose from all the little slips of paper friends and colleagues had been handing me (my priest wasn’t the only one who thought I needed someone to talk to) was also a nun.

I think it was Pope Francis who said, “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.” When I learned my therapist was a nun, I relaxed. She’ll pray for me, I thought, and then she’ll guide me through the work. I expected both to help. Over time, Sr. Therapist (she doesn’t know—or perhaps didn’t know until just now–that I call her that in my head), taught me to understand the world in terms of both/and. Yes, it’s scary and terrifying and might jump up and rip your heart out at any moment. And yes, it’s beautiful and wonderful and breathtaking.

I still have to resist the urge to ricochet from joy to sadness. I still want to send sadness to stand in that little chalk circle and leave me alone. But just today, one of my friends who knows me as well as anyone does listened to something I said and commented, “That was so realistic of you!”

Somewhere in the midst of all these half-written essays, my iPad told me that the word of the day was “fogdog: a bright spot that sometimes appears in a fog bank.” The Free Dictionary described it as, “A bright or clear spot that appears in breaking fog,” adding, “it accompanies fog as a dog accompanies its owner.” So, no “sometimes” in that definition. The fog and the fogdog jog along together. The OED adds that “On the banks of Newfoundland… fogdogs are considered precursors of clearer weather.” Cool, isn’t it?

When my brother and I stopped laughing, I thanked him for calling me with the news himself. Most people, I told him, leave that job to someone else. (And just in case you are like me, and find yourself able to believe in the unbelievable, I’ll clarify—my brother is alive and well and wearing a defibrillator vest in Pittsburgh.)

So there’s where the summer went. With each piece of scary news, I kept chanting both/and and trying not to slingshot between extremes. Last week before I messed up my back, I was doing yoga. I was standing in Warrior Two, and the voice on my iPad told me to trust my legs, to lean back farther, to feel my chest open. I did what the voice told me. I felt my legs pushing against the planet, and I felt the planet pushing back, holding me up. I’ve got you, it said. The pose went on and on and on and my quads started shaking. For a minute I felt something like panic, and then I felt something like peace.

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A few days ago, I was eating a roasted vegetable, pesto, and melted cheese sandwich in the school cafeteria when I overhead just enough of a conversation between my colleagues to become intrigued. “What is the meaning of life?” the historian said. The biologist replied, “What is life?” and then they both laughed.

I’ve been thinking about that second question. I learned this summer that a host of microorganisms calls my body home. I guess I’ve heard that before; I suspect in some long ago science class I looked at a drop of saliva under a microscope and saw tiny things scurrying around, but this summer when I read an article about the The National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, I was hooked. The NIH is working “to characterize the microbial communities found at several different sites on the human body, including nasal passages, oral cavities, skin, gastrointestinal tract, and urogenital tract, and to analyze the role of the microbes in human health and disease.” It’s the human genome project all over again, with a vastly expanded notion of “human.”

Some of the things I’ve read suggest we might have several pounds worth of these creatures eating lunch, going to work, sleeping, making love, and raising families, all snug inside the cozy planet previously known as “Me.”

Is it hubris to get excited about the idea that colonies of microorganisms call my body home?

I remember reading an article years ago about the giant sequoias in California. The author had climbed into the uppermost branches with a group of botanists and wrote about the entire ecosystem she encountered. If I’m remembering right, a distinct species of huckleberry flourishes in the canopy. I remember being amazed as I read that a mini-world hides above the world we know. I imagined how it would feel to be a bush whose roots sway in the California breeze. I like to think that to a root-bound creature it might feel like being part cloud.

I can’t really explain why I find these stories of mini-ecosystems so fascinating. Somehow the idea that bushes grow in trees or that microorganisms in my body are working beyond reach of my consciousness to keep me alive is oddly comforting.

Let’s be clear: I’ve never liked the idea of things crawling on me. When I was eight or nine, I used to tag along with a girl named Betsy as she delivered newspapers on Sunday mornings. I remember standing in her driveway, stuffing ads into the paper, and loading them into a big canvas Pittsburgh Press bag. At one point, while the rest of the neighborhood slept, my legs grew itchy. I looked down and was horrified to see hundreds of tiny aphids crawling out of my sneakers and swarming my legs. I jerked, I danced, and I howled, loud, neighbor-waking howls, until we finally dragged a hose out of Betsy’s garage and flushed the bugs away.

That was the end of letting things crawl on me. So it surprised me when I read about these studies to map the human microbiota and thought, “Cool!” In the pictures, they look like jars of multi-colored gummy bears, or necklaces of green, fuzzy jade, or twisty colored pipe-cleaners. These creatures, I’m reading, are linked to our health in ways that scientists are just beginning to explore.

As a young girl raised Catholic, I had lots of exposure outside of science class to the idea that my body was home to something other than “me”; in addition to being the container for that mysterious thing called soul, my body, I was taught, was also the temple of the equally mysterious Holy Spirit.

Honestly, that vision matches my experience fairly well. I have often felt deeply connected to the world. I’ve lived through solitary times when I have known, with the part of knowing that doesn’t happen in my head, that I was not alone. In her poem, “Some Questions You Might Ask,” Mary Oliver writes, “Is the soul solid, like iron?” and “Who has it, and who doesn’t?” The poem packs fourteen questions into twenty-one lines, including my favorite, “Why should I have it, and not the camel?”

Can you see where I’m going with this? I have just enough knowledge of science to put it to work to do bad theology. I’m not (quite!) saying I have discovered the soul and it is a collection of multicolored eukaryotes, but did you know they have been around for over a billion years? Do you know that they live in you and on you and that you are not, it turns out, ever really alone? It’s not our imaginations: something always pulses in the night.

One night in Pittsburgh I thought it was horses. I was staying with my parents in my childhood home and sleeping fitfully. The window by my bed was wide open, and late in the night I heard a horse whinnying deep in the woods. Longing spread through the trees as the animal called out, waited, called into the silence again. Finally, after what felt like hours, an answer came, and the two voices nickered back and forth. I fell asleep to their singing, bathed in wonder, gifted by this mysterious conversation.

Back home in Albuquerque, knowing there couldn’t be horses in those woods, I described the sound on an internet birding site. Within minutes, I received a link to a sound file identifying my midnight horses as screech owls. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Mated pairs may sing to each other antiphonally, both day and night.”

I want to say, I have heard the screech owls singing, each to each. In Eliot’s poem, after the mermaids sing each to each, “human voices wake us and we drown.” We all know that’s how the story always ends. A while ago, though, when I was still trying to decide if I should keep my guard up or settle in and trust the world, a priest stumped me by asking, “What is death, anyway?”

So here’s the thing I keep Googling. I want to know what happens to all those microorganisms when I die. Am I like those conifers in forest fires who open their pods and fling their seeds madly to the forest floor, shouting “Life Life Life!” into the flames? Do the bacteria in my digestive tract have a chance to flee their dying planet and strike out for a brave new world? Or do these same microbes who have devoted their lives to mine help me, one last time, to shed skin and bone and ease into element?

I like that idea. I’m trying to say that I’d be ok if it turned out that the secret to eternal life, to God, is symbiosis. I like to think that that huckleberry bush doesn’t know her roots never touch the ground, doesn’t know that the whole thing she calls the world is cradled in a net of branches, doesn’t know that she, too, is part huckleberry, part prokaryote, part bacteria, part fuzzy jade and twirly pipe-cleaner, part every other thing that teems and swims and breathes in this abundant world.

Just now, my ten year-old granddaughter asked me what I was writing about. I tried to explain without going in to too much detail that we have these tiny things living in us, and that I think it’s really cool. She got quiet for a minute, then stuck her tongue out. “Ew,” she said.

That’s another way of looking at it.

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Tag: Science

Fogdog

Bad Theology?