Sit Spot

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Compare with http://jwallphoto.blogspot.com/2017/09/gone-to-seed.html

I recently found a great little sit-spot on some big rocks in the mostly dry bed of Cataract Creek. It’s close to the trail, within earshot of passing hikers but out of sight behind the woods and walls of the ravine. There’s a small pool of water at the base of the rocks that the local birds know about, and if you sit still enough, a Pacific wren might skitter down for a drink just a few feet below you. Bigleaf maple, Doug fir, and tanoak make up most of the canopy, with hazel and huckleberry filling in some of the gaps on the forest floor. The space in between is fairly open, luminous in the morning sunshine, and the view from the sit spot gives the feeling of being suspended in that space.

Rippling unseen through the space was a placid soundscape of acorn woodpeckers cackling in the distance and an intermittent breeze breathing through the leaves overhead, all of which conspired to make me conscious of the atmosphere itself. If you think about it, the motion of gases in the air around us is as much a part of Earth’s fluid dynamics as the motion of water around fish in the ocean. And like the ocean, the fluid of our atmosphere isn’t composed of just one thing, but actually a myriad of different gas molecules, pollen grains, fungal spores, bacteria, and so on. The air actually has mass, or weight, and even hiking through it creates friction. With a little imagination you can picture yourself practically breast-stroking up the trail.

As you swim, think about the fact that while you are immersed in that sea of gas molecules, pollen grains, fungal spores, volatilized plant resins, and dust motes, that all of it is entering your body with every breath you take. Waves of light strike your skin and impart their warmth. Waves of sound strike into your ears and, like light entering your eyes, initiate a cascade of electro-chemical signals in your central nervous system, much of which rarely, if ever, escapes your subconscious realm. There is no sharp line dividing you from the atmosphere. In fact, there is no sharp line dividing you from everything that is.

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Resonant Frequency

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So I was sitting on the edge of the world out at Chimney Rock this morning, thinking about a couple of books I've been reading: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean, and The Brain That Changes Itself by Dr. Norman Doidge. At the base of the cliffs, elephant seals wriggled and belched while a rising tide began to reclaim their small sandy beach. Flocks of brown pelicans glided like arrows above lines of waves rising to meet the rocky shore. Looking out to sea, the Farallon Islands were the only point of reference in the silvery haze along the horizon. Large swells rippled inexorably toward shore on a low frequency, like pond ripples moving in slow motion.

According to the authors of these books, a hundred billion neurons and trillions of synapses were at work inside my skull as I sat cross-legged atop that coastal bluff in the morning sun, hardly moving a muscle. A bouillabaisse of more than a hundred different molecules, chemical compounds called neurotransmitters, were ferrying information within a forest of axons and dendrites, and the lunk with the camera bag hardly even noticed.

And that was just the stuff going on in my skull! The whole of my organism was respirating and metabolizing and doing countless other duties thanks to thirty-trillion cells that know more about chemistry, physics and biology—about life itself—than all the smartest scientists with all the latest technology in the whole wide world. And not only that, but whatever pebble fell fifteen billion years ago into the still and timeless void to get this surf party started, contained within itself—from the strings that build the quarks that build atoms that build the molecules—every potential that makes our world and our lives possible.

Looking out at the swells resonating across the ocean, I could imagine tracing them back to their source, like a jungle explorer following the trails of wild animals toward some El Dorado, some mystical center, and it seemed in that moment that the point of emanation is what the old Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu called "the pivot of tao," and that if you could say only one thing about that point before saying a second thing and contradicting yourself, it would have to be that it all began in a state of bliss.

That's right. All the crap emanating through time and space, everything that's good and bad, loving and indifferent, chaotic and orderly, had to start somewhere, and if you simmer it all down to its original essence, the last scintilla in the pan is bliss.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

On my way out to Chimney Rock along rutted roads and cow-burnt hillsides, I stopped briefly along the road to North Beach to photograph the setting harvest moon. While I was at it I noticed a flicker of movement on the periphery of my right eye. I turned to look and could hardly believe what I was seeing. A coyote at the top of a dune was leaping into the air as a pair of female marsh hawks made teasing passes just out of reach. It was like something from Alice in Wonderland. "Are they playing?" I wondered incredulously as I scrambled to change to a longer lens. "No," I answered myself, "there must be something at least halfway serious going on."

The coyote leaped three times that I saw clearly, but by the time I got the long lens on the camera and dialed up the ISO to get a decent shutter speed, the coyote and the hawks had spotted me spotting them, and they broke it up. It reminded me of a Far Side cartoon where animals are always doing something totally unexpected when the humans aren't watching.

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Mortal Asclepias

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I packed my camera gear up to Mt. Tam this morning to look for narrowleaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis), a lovely plant whose generic name honors the son of Apollo, god of medicine. I don't remember to look for it every year, but I last photographed it on Mt. Tam in 2011. The only time I ever saw or photographed a monarch butterfly caterpillar feeding on this plant that's so important to the life of monarchs, was 2003. There were no milkweed plants in their former haunts this year, not even at Potrero Meadow. I didn't see any jimsonweed either. I imagined a few seeds of both of these interesting and beautiful plants biding their time in the soil until conditions become favorable once again. Maybe next year.

UPDATE (9/26/17): I noticed my first blooming plum tree as I biked home from work today, which reminded me that a guy on the Marin Native Plants group on FB said the milkweed was blooming like crazy in Potrero Meadow back in late July, quite a bit earlier than usual. Shopping for yard plants at Sloat Garden Center last weekend I saw a monarch land on a plant and pointed it out to an employee who told me he'd found two monarch chrysalises just the week before. Yesterday afternoon I saw another monarch flutter by downtown, near Sue Bierman Park. It can't be good for monarchs to show up in fall, only to find the usual haunts of milkweed gone, having already bloomed weeks or months earlier.  

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Gone To Seed

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Golden Asymmetry

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A hundred years before I was born, Louis Pasteur wrote that the difference on Earth between things that have life and things that don’t is like the difference between a static photograph and a dynamic one:

“Most natural organic products, the essential products of life, are asymmetric and possess such asymmetry that they are not superimposable on their image,” he wrote. “This establishes perhaps the only well-marked line of demarcation that can at present be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter.”

When you compose an image on your screen or in your viewfinder, you notice that simply moving the center of interest away from the center turns a static (dead) scene into a dynamic (living) one. We think about, or maybe intuit, the “rule of thirds” when making a composition, but a more useful concept might be the “golden ratio” which does not draw a perfect circle, a perfect symmetry that ends where it begins, but a dynamic spiral with endless possibilities. 

As science has learned only recently, the universe itself exists due to an asymmetry between the matter and antimatter that were created together at the beginning of time. In those first moments of creation, matter and antimatter could have annihilated each other, but for some still-unknown reason they didn’t. Instead, about one in a billion particles of matter escaped to become the world we know and love.

Instead of going out in the crazy heat to shoot pictures I've been reading The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. That's where I learned that life itself also depends on asymmetry, or what chemists call chirality. Kean led me to the Louis Pasteur quotation above, which in turn led me to wonder if science has figured out yet how life got started in the first place. Apparently it has not.

“If you think about the physical world, it is not at all obvious why you don’t just make more dead stuff. Why does a planet have the capability to sustain life? Why does life even occur? The dynamics of evolution should be able to address that question. Remarkably, we don’t have an idea even in principle of how to address that question….” – Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld in Quantamagazine.

It’s kind of fascinating to draw a line from a universe where matter got a foothold due to asymmetry, to a planet where life got a foothold due to asymmetry, to a time when human beings would roam the earth and find beauty in asymmetry, in a golden ratio that perhaps reflects an archetype of consciousness that’s as deep as Creation itself.

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