Both Sides Now

Clouds are fascinating to watch. They make me think of December afternoons a long time ago, lying on the grass with my sister, watching the airplanes zooming by and wondering if Tatay (Dad) was there on his way home. Wondering when WE would have the chance to ride an airplane, what the clouds would look like from way up there. How that particular cloud looked like a ship with billowed sails... no, a tree on a hill, and then a kid with a lollipop.... Nanay (Mom), can we have a candy?!

School can demistify a lot of kiddie notions and imaginations. For this I am sad. Clouds simply became unimaginative masses of water vapor that escaped from the earth, shaped according to prevailing wind and temperature. What used to be an evil army of spirits about to overpower the landscape became "nimbus," and happy tufts of ice cream on the sunny sky became "cumulus," sleek feathered arrows from an unknown archer became "cirrus."

It's not just the clouds. The forest looks and feels different after college. A tree isn't simply just a tree: it's a "woody perennial" composed of tracheids and parenchyma cells, with xylem and phloem vessels going through the trunk. The leaves aren't just leaves: it has chlorophyll and stomates, with mesophyll layers and crassulacean acid metabolism pathways.

It's so hard to imagine anything now, with so much knowledge available at your fingertips and the nearby library. No more wondering about magical little people taking cover under the umbrella-like mushrooms during thunderstorms. Now I know that mushrooms sprout overnight because lightning splits the nitrogen from the air molecules and literally fertilizes the ground through the rain.

Image from: https://pixabay.com/en/thunderstorm-flashes-lightning-weft-549663/

I miss my imagination. All we have left to play with is seeing how fast we can figure out the connections and correlations around us. From people to plants to animals and cars to the air we breathe and back again. How two seemingly unrelated things in fact affect each other: a butterfly in Peru flaps its wings and it rains in Alabama.

It's useful in a lot of ways -no bit of information is totally useless, like helping to not set the human race on self-destruct. Still, I miss that creative spark I used to have, that science school has almost totally enlightened out of me. Sometimes I wish someone could help me unlearn all that I have (or switch it off), and help me write again the way I used to.

Thank you for reading. :-)

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This article has been previously published in the December 2002 issue of DAISY: THE PERSONAL ZINE. It is a PRINT publication to which I own the copyright (Aster bellis is one of the old scientific names for Daisy).

Occasionally I will be uploading my previous writings because I am learning that while paper may be easily destroyed, something on a blockchain just might last for a long long time. All images without attribution are mine.