BY HANNES THUM
I miss a lot. It’s pretty well understood that our human sensory brains have to process and triage stimuli constantly, and that a lot gets cut out by subconscious processes before it ever makes it to our conscious awareness. That is to say that a great deal of the information that passes through our eyes and ears and noses and otherwise into our nervous system never really makes it into our awareness. Or at least that’s how I feel.
So it strikes me when, for whatever reason, something catches my eye in a new way.
This time, it was a series of young green plants (that I think will prove to be arrowleaf balsamroot, but that’s not really here nor there) pushing themselves out of the ground on some southern hills last week, in a canyon that we frequent. If I kneeled down to look closer, this organism was a pioneer—pushing itself up and out of the soil, shoving small clods of dirt aside, and reaching up toward the sunny sky.
And then, I looked around and realized that, of course (duh), the whole hill was covered in these emerging plants—all of them growing fast and strong and true and filling up what was previously a brown hillside and turning it into a lush garden.
And then, I sat down and looked downhill into the canyon to where aspens and cottonwoods were suddenly catching the late afternoon sun in a brilliant green display of sprouting and blooming and flourishing vegetation.
How can we ever take this crazy process for granted? Or how could I?
This, this making of something out of seemingly nothing. An actual creation of matter. From thin air. Like a rabbit out of a hat.
This has got to be one of the greatest magic tricks that the universe has ever come up with. Taking air and water and light and making new substances out of them, just as easy as pie. Certainly, as far as we humans are concerned, it might be the greatest gift that the universe has ever offered up.
Most of the universe, including our solar system, is bathed in energy. Electromagnetic radiation of one form of another washes over and around us, although most of it does not result in life.
Very little of our universe holds life as we know it. As far as we know, this planet is the only place. And, the reason that life can exist here is because certain creatures, photosynthesizers such as plants, figured out how to capture little bits of that radiating energy and turn it into solid molecules that we can eat.
These plants convert the energy in the universe into biomass—the physical stuff of life. Without them, none of us would be alive.
It’s this insane ability to turn sunlight into organic molecules, in turn feeding every creature that you and I can name, that makes us indebted to photosynthesis.
And it’s this amazing trick that finally made me stop to look.
