Alas, a lass hath let time pass, but I return today, belatedly recalling it is Blog Action Day. It's a day, by the way, asking bloggers everywhere to write about the environment, and even though the blog post I intended to write bears no pertinence, in another of my manic moments of Discovery and Elation, I can clumsily relate the two (erstwhile post, and the environment), because we have learned, haven't we, that Everything Is Related.
To wit, the Prorocentrum minimum above, a dinoflagellate (that being a phytoplankton with characteristics of both plants and animals, for those, like me, who did not heretofore know this), and one of the principal reasons for the nefarious Red Tide. But this is what so disorients me: Isn't it beautiful? And how do we reconcile its beauty with its toxic role in our oceans and bays and rivers and lakes? How can even the tiniest (and potentially lethal) organism have such beauty and power? It produces neurotoxins that are implicated in poisoning of many marine species (and can poison humans, through ingestion of said species), and yet there is a mutually symbiotic benefit when Prorocentrum minimum is present in coral reefs.
Is it an allegory for the deception of beauty? A lesson in humility (how doth the tiny microbe wreak its mortal vengeance)? A reminder of the colossally Mixed Nature of Existence? I cannot say, but its name holds a clue to the following:
Name the one word which has the following (mostly) implausibly unrelated definitions:
1) A musical half note
2) 1/60th of a dram
3) a member of a religious order founded by St. Francis of Paola
4) a short vertical stroke
5) outsiders within the Jewish community
6) a former British manufacturer of audio decoders
7) a creature or thing of the least size or importance
Answer: minim.
2 comments:
Such insight, such delight. Thank you for the invite.
If we reduce this phenominimum of life to the test of friend or foe, we shall have failed to understand life itself and the necessity of intuiting life's beautiful dance of dynamic equilibrium.
Envision any natural creature in motion, full of impossible poise, startling grace, and a preternatural sense of timing, balance, and ease. Then something unnatural occurs...
Through lack of ease, the dancer meets disease.
Disaster Disease Dysfunction
Whether we decry the toxicity of naturally occuring phytoplankton or wage "war" on disease, we deny life's truth, and its imperative: to confine and define that which is the divine. Anything less, simply would not be divine. Disaster and disease maintains the divine.
Life described in any other context is mere wishful artifact, the stuff of adult fairy tales in which only Yang is needed to conclusively
define Tao.
How to escape this trap? In problem solving we must first understand the problem. To understand the problem is to understand the difference between the cause and the effect.
Most, if not all of life's unsolved problems are the result of waging war on the effects of the problem, instead of understanding and dealing with the causes of the problem.
Davian, I'm not at all sure who you are (are you my brother?), but your comment on my post takes my breath away. What a beautifully articulated response - thank you. It brings me peace, and a sense of closure on a topic that left me feeling so upended and unsure. If I am to have readers such as you, I am determined to write more!
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