Morning storm clouds. The light bit at edges, accentuating the few colors that poked through the gray dawn gloom. A brisk wind swirled from the northwest, a breeze out of Chocolat.

A cherry tree dumped its blossoms like a snow squall, surrounding me with impossible pink light. The heavy rain drops followed seconds later, soaking the pink petals so thick they hid the grass.

Even in the middle of it, I try to remember, and I cannot. Remembering anything other than those things that will keep us alive is a human conceit. Turns out I'm human.

Change is coming. As it has. As it will.

***

I am teaching about evolution, descent with modification. It is going better than most years have.

I spent a few moments talking about Charles Lyell and the concept of uniformitarianism, the idea that whatever natural laws apply here, today, apply anywhere and anytime. I dropped a small chunk of wood as I spoke. It fell each time, as expected, landing loudly on the desk.


This is where science relies on faith.

And it does. The kids relax just a tad. All year long I've assured them that we know less than we think, that the world is a wonderful place despite this, and that science requires, at a very basic level, faith.

Not the kind of faith many of them have been taught, but faith nonetheless. 8 months after we first met each other, things are starting to fall into place.

Of course the piece of wood will fall, each and every time, and we know this only because it always has. This may seem trivial, but it's the soul of reality, whatever "reality" means.

***

Were humans as inevitable as the fall of the block of wood I dropped over and over again? I leave it to the students to ponder. I'm not particularly interested in the question--we're here, and that's enough for me.

But they are, which is why I pose it. Their universe swirl around each of their own existences, and I just called it into question.

It's my hope that by June, they will know as little as I do.

Decision time....

READ MORE - On matters of faith

I love cherry blossoms, and we live a stone's throw away from Branch Brook Park. At dusk I got my nose dusted yellow from sniffing hundreds, maybe thousands, of flowers.

Photo by Cathy Elliott-Shaw

As I sniffed one tree's flowers, then the next, hundreds of people were taking photos in the ethereal light, the sun sitting snug just below the horizon, a bulging moon high up in the east.

We are (mostly) visual creatures. We analyze light, look for patterns, capture it digitally so we can show others what we think we saw. We have art shows comparing our various abilities to capture light, to hold the world in a frame. We can discern a good photograph from a mediocre one, talk about contrast and angles and resolution.

Me and my nose live in a different world, a world of sinuous curves instead of angles, smudges instead of contrast, a world where time and distances dissolve into layers of fog swirling into each other. The cameras capture the sensuous, pleasing the cortex, blending thought and analysis and the beauty of order; my nose triggers the sensual, flaring up the olfactory lobe, part of our more primitive brain, visceral, without language.

The art of observing, the crucial first step of science, requires all of our senses. Schooling focuses on the visual. For all the talk of various learning styles, our standardized tests focus on what can be seen, what can be analyzed, what can be fairly assessed.

Photo by Colin Archer

I encourage my lambs to use their noses in class--we sniff basil, gingko ("vomit" fruit), dirt, sea water, elodea--and by the end of the year, I see students routinely using their noses when examining something new in class.

This is not something they are ever likely to face on a standardized exam in public schools. Not everything worth learning is easily assessed. When we reduce our classes to laboratories of the easily assessable, we reduce the natural world. When we reduce the natural world, we reduce science.

Alas, odors can be a problem-ever smell a rotten starfish?

First Branch Brook photo NJ photo courtesy of Cathy Elliott-Shaw via nj.gov; 
Second photo  by Colin Archer/Agency New Jersey via NJ Monthly. 

If you live within driving distance, it's worth the hike--
more flowering Japanese cherry trees than anywhere in the States--take that, D.C.! 

READ MORE - Proust in the classroom

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, by us.

We cannot know what bees know, but we close our minds, our universe, when we presume mechanistic explanations for all animals not human. If I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I'm throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

***

After giving myself to the first tree, I imagined blending honey and cherries and yeast to make this year's melomel. I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2--she was carrying her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. I suspect she saw me doing the same a moment earlier.

The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: "There may be bees in those flowers--get away!"

She slinked away, now fearful of bees, and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose--a child in love with flowers and bugs does not work well in cubicles.

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.

You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.

You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.

You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.

You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.

You can bury your face in early April cherry blossoms.

You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.

What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?

Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?

Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?

***

My Dad is dead. He loved bees.
My Mom is dead. She loved bees.
My sister is dead. She loved bees.
I will someday be dead. I love bees.

Maybe it's the bees that are killing us. Maybe it's not. But if it is, I'd still love the bees.

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.

The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter--she died two days later, while I held her hand.
The last few hours of my Dad's life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.
I did not hold my sister's hand--she was killed by an errant missionary--but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always. Like a bee humming she sang, sang, sang.

***

It's spring.

The flowers are back. The bees are back. The mystery, too, is back.

We can spend our Januaries pondering the mystery of life, the misery of death, while our brethren sleep through the dark days.

But now it's spring--humans with their electric lights and propane heaters no longer dictate the terms.

Get outside. Breathe. Live.

READ MORE - Let it bee....