LIFE
Something has happened since I came back from my month long trip and then got Covid the next day. I do things but I have no drive to do anything. I don’t know if that comes from the letdown following a trip, some after effect of Covid, or old age and a slide into dementia, or simply a slowing down of my body.
Realizing that I had nothing that I wanted to write about today and knowing that the world wasn’t waiting breathlessly to hear from me in any case and not wanting to go for a ride or visit the museum in town or take photographs or do anything at all I decided to go for a walk up Jone’s Mountain, hoping the walk would wake me up.
And it did. I walked slowly and a little wobbly, my back hurt and I wasn’t interested in anything I saw. I took no photographs. But even in my numb state I couldn’t help notice the profusion of life all around me. There were plants with a huge variety of symmetrical leaf shapes leaning into the narrow path. In the long slow process of evolution, probably from one original reproducing form of life which then branched out to all plant life and animal life and fungal life and virus life, all of this connected life was around me in profusion. There was one kind of tree competing with another kind of tree but probably with some kind of symbiotic connection. Hundreds fo kinds of plants, each with their distinctive leaves and flowers and seeds which had all developed long ago from the same source and branched out were here. And of course so were birds and insects and a white fungus that smeared on the ground. Even in my numb state this profusion and variety of life seemed fantastic and unexplainable.
Even for an non biologist like myself it seems as if there is some form of intelligence or choice making function within the
DNA of all of this life which propels it along from the dropped seed to the towering tree to flowers which rotate to catch the sunlight. Some life force is impelling every thing along. And the same life force was impelling me along, too. I didn’t feel like walking, but something drew me out and up the mountain and something got me to wondering what was going on.
And it occurred to me that as far as I know anyway, that I was the only life form on the mountain that was aware of this process.
While every other form of life is driven to hunt and eat and mate and propogate, all of which keeps all life forms impelled along from birth to death, and while most of what I do is driven by the same DNA triggered process, that I was the only life form that was aware of this process, or could be aware, since most of the time I don’t think about it either and am blindly impelled along by drives beyond my control, even when I am old, serving no useful function and am a weight on society. I am still aware of the drives that keep me going until I keel over.
Now, of course, being aware is one of the things that I am driven to do without being aware of it just as moles are driven to keep burrowing underground in the search for food or fish are driven up rivers to spawn. There is nothing different about me, I just have a drive to awareness that other animals don’t have or maybe have to a lesser degree or have in a different way that can’t be put into words.
Something Phil Diehn said last Friday at our men’s group sticks with me. A small bat got into his screened in porch and, once in, hid itself away to protect itself. He found it under a cushion, opened the door and got it to fly away. Bats seem a little spooky and even threatening to me though I know they help clear away insects. But Phil looked them up, probably on the Internet, and it turns out that the closest species to bats genetically are not mice or any other little forest creature, the closest kin to bats are primates:monkeys and humans. Bats are our kissing cousin, at some point very long ago an ancestor to all three veered away and over eons developed wings and sharp hearing and found its niche. Our brains, our organs, our bone structure are all very similar as is our
DNA. In a way looking at that bat Phil realized that the slight split in their DNA led to both of them looking at each other as cousins. Apparently bats are very smart. I wonder if they are aware of themselves and of us and communicate it to each other in high pitched squeaks. Phil, me, could have just as well been a bat instead of a human.
Now I’ve probably jumbled all of this up. And a six year old could have thought of this connection of life forms and wondered what I have wondered. There is nothing profound here except that the fact of all life being blindly pushing along in this way is a dumbfoundingly wild idea, almost as wild as the Big Bang from which everything evolved. Those folks pushing back against the idea of evolution have set themselves up to be bulldozed by actuality and are also missing out on the greatest miracle of all. So that is what walking up the mountain made me think about.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 