Born!

Two children were born last night. Twins. One of my best friends, their mother, welcomes them in the world today. I celebrate this event with snapshot of my day:

Today  I peered deep into a world normally invisible to the human eye, into the microcosmos of a drop of water. There I saw thousands of life forms whirling in a thin film forced beneath a microscope. The laboratory is a sterile and uninviting place, but I remember clearly the first time I discovered this vitality in water with the naked eye. I stood by a small spring-fed stream in Ohio. On one of the first warm days of spring, I stared into a pool left in the stone by receding waters. There in the delicate lace of shadow and light, I noticed the faintest of dimples: the shadow of many small crustaceans. I later identified them as copepods, daphnia, scuds...

From The Rotifera Dr. Charles Thomas Hudson (1889)

Looking downstream at the light refracting in a mottled web, I saw the shoreline broadleaves shine from underneath as though they were the givers, not receivers, of light. I saw the mayflies threading the air which was also cleanly lit from the swarms of midges, caddisflies, golden, tapping the surface, ripples radiating. With each drop they washed eggs into the water. I realized then that water could never be found pure and empty, but is ever a brew of many minerals, dissolved gasses and lives uncountable. So, many insects and amphibians, by their relation to water, reveal to us the great story of life on earth: a vast tree, whose first roots grew not out of firm soil but a supple, rich solution.

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Some say that a baby born in water is given a buffer between the two worlds of mother and universe. Water being known for its stability in the face of rapid temperature change, the buoyancy comes as an added gift, a feeling of weightless reminiscent of the first waters.

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My moment with the microscope reminded me of a passage I once read from a pamphlet on Algonquin lake ecology, a pamphlet my dearest friend Kathleen picked up on a headstrong journey to Canada to meet the aurora borealis. I include the piece here as a testament to the many discoveries that lay ahead for us all, as adults, but especially for those young ones. For the young, the whole world and all their entire lives stretches before them, like a mountain, or maybe a drop of water.


From: The Rotifera; or wheel-animalcules by Dr. Charles Thomas Hudson (1889)


"But if, retaining sense and sight, we could shrink into living atoms and plunge under the water, of what a world of wonders should we then form part! We should find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures:--creatures that swim with their hair, that have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly within their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. Here are some riding at anchor, moored by delicate threads spun out from their toes; and there are others flashing by in glass armour, bristling with sharp spikes or ornamented with bosses and flowing curves; while, fastened to a green stem, is an animal convolvulus that by some invisible power draws a never-ceasing stream of victims into its gaping cup, and tears them to death with hooked jaws deep down within its body."


Frightening as this may seem, the human world is no less vicious or beautiful.


If we can find so much life in a drop of water, from a jar scooped out of the Ouachita, how much more could a human child contain, being as it were, a good  60% or more of the good stuff.