What’s the amazing thing, you ask? It’s a red maple tree that is flowering outside my house right now.
That’s not amazing, you say? Well, have you considered the fact that every one of those flowers is a sex organ?
I don’t mean that as a metaphor. That’s literally what they are. Inside every bloom there’s a stamen producing pollen and a pistil waiting to receive it. The petals, the color, the fragrance, all of it is the plant version of private parts. Plants can’t move, so they evolved flowers so that they can get frisky with each other. Think about that next time you stick your nose in a tulip.
And many have opened their relationships up to a third party. Flowers have developed ultraviolet patterns completely invisible to human eyes that function, for bees, like a neon motel sign.
As a bee approaches, she’s already carrying a positive static charge, built up the same way you build one by rubbing a balloon on your head. The flower is grounded and negatively charged. Before the bee even touches the petal, the pollen defies gravity and blasts through the air to stick to her fuzzy, bumbly body.
She flies back to the hive full of nectar and loaded with electric pollen. Then she tells the colony exactly where to find more…by busting a move. Basically, she does the Mashed Potato, throws in a Moonwalk, and finishes with a little Shimmy, and all the other bees are like, “oh, good flowers at the top of the field, sweet.”
The angle of her body as she does the Macarena translates the position of the sun into a map. Forty-five degrees to the right of straight up means fly forty-five degrees to the right of the sun. Even under cloud cover, bees use polarized light to know exactly where it is.
Up in the branches of that same maple, a gray squirrel is faking an alarm call so everyone freezes and he can sneak in some afternoon delight without competition. A caterpillar chomps into a leaf, and the tree will respond by luring in caterpillar-eating wasps, basically a NATO-style airstrike agreement. On the bark, thousands of tardigrades, the only animals known to survive the vacuum of space, are currently shriveled into glass balls, and will reanimate within minutes the next time it rains. I like to imagine they do it with a little pop.
And then follow the trunk down into the dirt.
In the top ten centimeters of soil, mycorrhizal fungi form a web so dense that if you unspooled every thread, it would stretch 450 quadrillion kilometers. For reference, our entire Milky Way galaxy is about 950 quadrillion kilometers across. The fungal network beneath your feet is half the width of our galaxy.
If you scaled our sun down to the size of a single white blood cell, the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. And our galaxy is one of roughly 200 billion others. Some of them contain up to a hundred trillion stars. There are about 10,000 stars for every grain of sand on Earth.
All of that is real. It’s a minuscule fraction of the incredible stuff going on. Meanwhile, I’m having an existential crisis in a Dunkin’ drive-thru.
A Dunkin’ Drive-Thru and a Minor Collapse
On Monday, we were in the first hour of a drive home from New York City. Both kids were sleeping, and I started getting tired, too, so I decided to get a coffee at a rest stop. I rolled down the window and was greeted with the loudest voice that’s ever been produced by a speaker in world history:
HI WILL YOU BE USING THE DUNKIN MOBILE APP TODAY???
Horrified, I looked into my rearview mirror, and sure enough, Gus was awake. He spent the rest of the 3 hour car ride fussing, and I spent that time internally cataloguing all the other things I’ve screwed up in life.
The Spring Session campaign should have been different. I should’ve promoted it earlier. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. I’m pretty sure my life is going to unravel and I’ll end up living alone under a bridge.
My world got very small in those two hours. I became hyperfocused on myself, and entered a mental dungeon voluntarily. And not the fun kind of dungeon.
And then I heard a giggle, and looked up.
Gus was looking over at Mae. She made a face. He laughed. She made it again, bigger. He completely lost it. Two little goofballs, delighting in nonsense, with no idea I’d spent the whole drive charting my own collapse.
Something loosened.
Liquid Dinosaurs and a Car Full of the Big Bang
Suddenly, I’m going 70 mph in a vehicle that runs on liquid dinosaurs. And in the backseat are two humans who materialized out of the DNA of the two people in the front seat. Two chuckling hyenas that are the physical manifestation of the Big Bang, right here in our car.
And all four of us have an organ in our skulls that produces consciousness. Nobody on earth can explain how. Something is in there, experiencing all of this. We don’t even have a good theory.
You don’t have to be standing in front of a red maple. Sometimes it finds you on the Merritt Parkway, in a car full of snack wrappers, looking into a rearview mirror.
If you’d like to book a session or just talk through what
family photos might look like for your family, I’m easy to reach. No pressure, no sales pitch.
Just reach out.
