~thankful thursday~ light cone

Posted on December 3, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed. It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

Posted on November 22, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

~thankful thursday~ navigating transitions

Posted on November 16, 2017 by marybethrew

11/9/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

i may have already mentioned a certain man i am thankful for, but recently i’ve been specifically feeling gratitude for his navigational skills. there is just about nothing i’d rather be doing than riding in the passenger seat while he drives me anywhere. it was why we chose to go on a road trip for our honeymoon this summer. we are very happy driving places together! this still blows me away, because there was a time in my life when not only was i expected to do the navigating, i was put down for how badly i did the job. i still claim that i am better with directions at sea than on land, but i don’t think i’d be so bad at land navigation if i hadn’t been emotionally abused so much in that area. now, on the exceedingly rare occasions that rich does ask a navigational question of me, guess what? it’s okay with him if i make a mistake or simply have no idea what the answer to the question is. it’s just simply not a source of stress in our lives.

most of the time, however, nothing is required of me in this department, because rich just seems to always know which way to turn. we drove a different way to portland last weekend, back roads the whole way, until at one point he told me, “ok hang on, we’re going on a new adventure!” and put on his turn signal. it’s amazing how he never has to back track or ask for directions, and equally amazing how he turns off on so many unmarked country roads that seem like they probably don’t go anywhere, at least to my eye. we made it to portland with time to spare for coffee and a burger before the show.

in the state of oregon, his directional abilities have a lot to do with having driven his kids back and forth across the state for years on their way to track meets, basketball games, and other sporting events. he rarely even consults an atlas anymore, when we are traveling inside the state. when we drove across state lines to montana for our honeymoon, he could be found sneaking a peak at various maps. i think it is recreational reading for him to study how the roads all weave together across the terrain. all of this is lovely for me, since it means i get to ride in my favorite seat and photo-document the journey.

11/10/17

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

today i am grateful for date night, rainbows, and inspirational women!

11/11 and 11/12 and 11/13/17

~30 days of gratitude~ days 11, 12, and 13

i am grateful for forgiveness. i sometimes lose track of days and plans and agendas and schedules whenever the week transitions from life with quinn to life without quinn. i forgive myself for not getting an A in gratitude, and skipping a few days while i regrouped (and worked, and played, and went on a date, and cooked and cleaned.) i forgive myself for putting off writing a holiday to-do list, and i forgive myself for that list being insanely long once i finally wrote it, in spite of wanting to keep the holidays simple, and i forgive myself for not checking any items off the list yet.

i’m thankful for the way ani difranco (who i got to see on friday night, so lucky, so grateful!) has managed to write lyrics that describe my life for several decades running. she had her daughter a month before i had my son (and he was almost a month overdue), and while we were both pregnant she wrote, “you’re gonna love this world if it’s the last thing i do, the whole extravagant joke topped in bittersweet chocolate goo, for someone who ain’t even here yet, look how much the world loves you…”

it feels like an extravagant joke topped in bittersweet chocolate goo to drop off my son only to turn around and get taken on a date. i miss him but i think i appreciate both him and the time alone with my man all the more for the times in between. and then i am overjoyed to pick him up a week later.

transitions are a way of life for my kiddo, who spends equal halves of his life in two separate households. he has grown so much in his ability to transition gracefully, and now he does a better job than anyone. and that’s not to mention developmental transitions that are going on all the time. into fifth grade, into percussion lessons, into packing his own school lunches, into attending theatre workshops, into defying his mama and staying awake to read his book under the covers by head lamp. more bittersweet chocolate goo!

i am thankful for how forgiveness of past hurts frees me from the poison of resentment. i am also thankful for the perspective to know the difference between forgiveness and acceptance of unacceptable behavior. forgiveness is a present i give myself, not a welcome mat for abuse.

i thank my lucky stars that my husband and i don’t venture into areas requiring forgiveness.

like the little creatures in the ocean that bioluminesce, i am trying to generate my own light during this dark time. many organisms are triggered to glow when they encounter disturbance, and transition times are a continuous source of predictable disturbance for me, like waves, like tides. i have always felt like that dynamic position in the universe where air, land and sea coalesce on the edge of the ocean is the most magical, and of course that transition between rain and sun that brings us rainbows is another personal favorite. i am thankful for the magic around the edges of things.

11/14 and 11/15/17

~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

i am thankful for rainbows in unexpected places and other surprises.

p.s. last night i was thankful for nachos again!

quest for sparkles

Posted on November 8, 2017 by marybethrew

the day after our 3 month anniversary, i went for a run on the beach and noticed what looked like shimmering glass marbles in the surf zone. upon closer examination i figured out that they were jelly blobs, and more specifically, ctenophores. i have had a love for ctenophores ever since i learned about them in my 20s, and witnessed some of their more magical tricks like bioluminescence. the ones i found seem to be a non-bioluminescent species, i think from the genus pleurobrachia, but they still made rainbow shimmery sparkles as they floated in the vessel in which i whisked them back to my lab in order to peek at them under the microscope and watch them moving their cilia and tentacles to my heart’s content. (since they were gasping their final whatever-is-analagous-to-breath-for-an-invertebrate, i felt ok about scooping a few up out of the sand and plopping them into some water before their inevitable demise.)

i looked back at my 2011 post about bioluminescence, and it made me smile, because so many of the things coming to mind to say about it, i have already said. memory loss is special. at least i remembered that i did write a post. to review:

all cells bioluminesce! including our own, though most do so in a range that is outside of our vision;
dolphins swimming through glowing waves are stunningly pretty, and walking on the stars, on beach sand full of bioluminescent dinoflagellates, was our college pastime;
there’s a long list of unanswered questions in the science of bioluminescence and i am content to leave room for the mystery;
choose your own glowing totem, or as 4 year old quinn would say, spirit guy, and let it inspire you to shine your light.

while trying to identify my gelatinous friends, i learned about the role they play in regulating the food web. as predators of other smaller zooplankton, they can keep copepods from overgrazing the phytoplankton. the marine ecosystem exists in delicate balance. i would bet that their turning up in numbers on a sunny day in october was just part of the ebb and flow of maintaining that balance.

even though my little sea gooseberries aren’t bioluminescent, they did put on a fabulous flickering rainbow show for me under the microscope, their rows of cilia waving like so many prayer flags in a breeze.

in my 2011 post i referred to a trip into a bioluminescent bay in la parguera, puerto rico. here is my journal entry following that sparkly nightswimming magic. and while we’re humming r.e.m. songs, this passage feels half a world away, both in geographic distance, and in the fact that i was half my current age when i wrote it:

3-13-98

“our watch began at 7:00 but was pleasantly interrupted not long after it began by our quest for sparkles with captain pepe. this is one place I have to bring lauren someday, because although these aren’t purple sparkles, they sure are amazing. we drove in the boats for about 20 minutes to get to the spot, all the way singing “on top of old smoky” and “found a peanut” and playing telephone and the animal game (moose) which was a riot. (ribbit ribbit quack quack meow sss!) when we got there, people started jumping in the water, and you could see their hands and feet moving as they tread water. it was a muddy bottom and only about 3 or 4 feet deep. we all had on our masks and we watched our hands move and light up and sparkle as they moved through the water. it was so magical. if you lifted your arms out, they sparkled for a moment. the sparkles clung to hair and bathing suits especially well, and my black swimsuit sparkled as I climbed back on the boat. for the first few minutes of the ride home, we were totally silent, like we had just witnessed something extraordinary. it’s the things like that, which seem unnecessary but add so much, which make me just as sure as ever that this world is not random.”

i read recently that bioluminescent bays around puerto rico (there are only a handful) may have been affected by the recent hurricane. considering all the rest of the hardships they are going through, it would be yet another loss. as so many there are living without light, it would be sad if their glowing bays were to go dark as well.

on the evening of october 24^th, the next day after i brought stray ctenophores home from the beach, i walked outside to find my husband standing in the front yard. it is not uncommon for me to encounter him this way, and as soon as i stood beside him and he put his arm around me and we both looked up, a gigantic shooting star streaked across the sky above us. “is that what you wanted me to come outside for?” i asked, and he answered in the affirmative.

rich and i have already lined up a date for july 28, 2061, just after our 44^th wedding anniversary, to watch halley’s comet, whose tail is responsible for the orionid meteor shower from which our shooting star originated, return to the inner solar system. he’ll be 91 and i’ll be 83. we won’t talk about how old we each were in 1986 when we both remember seeing it the last time. (awkward!) gazing into the vastness of the universe has a way of rendering minor age differences completely irrelevant anyway. december 2061 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the beginning of our quest for sparkles together, which will be a very sparkly-twinkly time indeed. not that we’re in any hurry! we are enjoying the fiery bits of comet tail we get to witness in the meantime.

what’s 8 earth years in the grand scheme of things, really?

now that there are more hours of darkness than light again, and the abrupt shift away from daylight savings makes the available light feel even more scarce, i find myself yearning for light all the more. just when my need for light intensifies, a bright light streaking across the sky, and a little reminder that i carry light in my own cells is just what i need.

i suppose that is where this post came from; it’s my attempt to generate my own light to shine into this darkness and be a rainbow, like my little spirit guy ctenophores, and bend that light into a spectrum of colors.

~rainbow mondays~ butterfly butts and darth moths

Posted on June 20, 2016 by marybethrew

red: the biggest one

red: seeing hearts

red: a dragon of dragon house 2.0

red: darth moth

orange: lilies of the lab

yellow: one of the best things about the bayou walks is the wafting aroma of honeysuckle lurking around various corners

yellow: i finally sat still long enough to catch some swallowtail photos

it was impossible to just choose one…

yellow-green: western tanager is still hanging around, eating the neighbor’s plums in addition to our cherries.

green: another frugivore munching huckleberries on the bayou trail.

green: the bayou

green: fauna of the bayou. yes, i know, seeing a mama hummingbird feeding its baby was supposed to be once in a lifetime, but apparently someone goofed, because i just got to witness it twice in the same one. (different birds: this one has apparently fledged but is still getting help from mama; this one is in our backyard, while the others were from work.)

so glad i happened to be holding my camera.

thank you, universe.

blue: more bayou fauna, this time cedar waxwings.

blue: the view from down here

blue: finding some creative alternative lighting options for the dragon house kitchen. since we don’t get real fireflies here, we’re having to mimic bioluminescence with artificial firefly jars: micro leds in an old blue jar above my sink.

periwinkle: there really should be more periwinkle in the rainbow…

purple: bayou grasses

purple: butterfly butt, as it turned its back on me to drink from each and every blossom on the bright purple buddleia.

i hope you have a fantastic week!

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

bioluminescence

Posted on March 5, 2011 by marybethrew

"hey, baby"

a portrait of the artist as a ctenophore

i have been fascinated by bioluminescence since long before i knew it by that name. one of the best things about growing up in the northeastern united states on a farm with big grassy meadows was the abundance of fireflies- a nightly summer sight that will always top my list of things i miss most about the east coast. as an undergraduate, i learned that unlike the handful of terrestrial species (such as fireflies) that glow at night, the marine environment is home to thousands of species that produce their own light. mind blowing! more important than the facts i learned, however, were the many experiences i was fortunate to have involving some of those creatures. again, i managed to matriculate in an area (long island’s east end) where fairly often, there was low enough ambient light and high enough concentrations of bioluminescent critters in the sand that night time walks on the beach (taken with great frequency by procrastinating college students) were often a dance workout, wherein groups of us would drag our feet and hands along the wet sand on the edge of the ocean in order to watch the streaks of glowing light.

as a SEAmester student, i was immersed in bioluminescent experiences figuratively (almost nightly our schooner created a glowing bow wake, just from sailing through the water and disturbing the dinoflagellates swimming there, causing them to emit their glow) and literally (we took a swim in a bioluminescent bay in la parguerra, puerto rico, and got to watch our own bodies glowing head to toe from the plankton adhered like dot-to-dots along our skin and swimsuits). one of my favorite visions of all time is watching dolphins race along beside the boat, the night too dark to actually see them, but knowing their presence from the way the water was streaked with light and the sound of their exhalations each time they’d surface. i continued my love affair with bioluminescence later on when i was employed as a professional mariner (doesn’t that sound more awesome than “deckhand” or “schooner bum”?) and have been known to jump in the water at night, right off the side of the ship in port, even in places (filled with ctenophores) as unlikely as new jersey.

glowing ctenophore in watercolor, tweaked in photoshop

shine your light

“the question of why so many animals are bioluminescent still does not have a satisfactory answer.” – S. Haddock (et al.) bioluminescence in the sea (annu. rev. mar. sci. 2010 2:443-93.) (gotta love the open access movement in the scientific literature… you, too, can read this review- all 50 pages! i know you’re as excited as i was!)

translation: “we dunno.” -me

what do the leading scientists in the field mean, they don’t know?! let’s break it down. we are talking about generating light on a cellular level. light, radiating not from the sun, not from electrical current…. but from reactions that take place within the very cells of the organism. light from within living beings. and get this, according to wikipedia, “all cells produce some form of bioluminescence within the electromagnetic spectrum, but most are neither visible nor noticeable to the naked eye. every organism’s bioluminescence is unique in wavelength, duration, timing and regularity of flashes.” all cells! that includes mine, and yours, and everyone else’s! we all have the ability to generate light from within, and illuminate the darkness surrounding us. now if that’s not a sacred truth brought straight to you by the natural world, i don’t know what is.

so it turns out, science can unlock all sorts of mysteries of how the chemistry and physics and biology behind this phenomenon work, what enzymes catalyze which reactions, and so on. but science isn’t satisfied with the explanations of why these things even happen (though science assumes it will someday know…) for me, the question itself is where i find satisfaction, i am just as happy as a bioluminescent bivalve that these mysteries exist and even happier that yes, it is possible that some questions will never be answered by science. i think it is important, as scientists, as human beings, to hold that space for the possibility of mystery.

but before i get carried away with the spiritual aspects of bioluminescence,

a few definitions

bioluminescence, simply put, is the emission of light by living organisms, and it also refers to “the light so produced”. either way, what we have here is a noun. creatures are said to be bioluminescent (adj.) if they are capable of pulling off this amazing feat. as mentioned, we are all bioluminescent- it’s just that the particular wavelength we emit may not always fall within the visible-to-us portion of the spectrum.

not to be confused with some related phenomena:

fluorescence: light produced when external energy is absorbed by the organism, and then emitted again by it immediately.

phosphorescence: a form of fluorescence where the energy is absorbed, stored and slowly re-emitted (in this case, we’re still getting energy from an external source. think glow-in-the-dark star stickers on your ceiling- they need to be charged up by having light shined on them.) the term phosphorescence was in vogue for a long time, and often used interchangeably to refer to what we now understand to be bioluminescence.

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to…to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that’s the genius behind poetry.” ~ Emily Dickinson

noctiluca scintillans, a bioluminescent dinoflagellate (roughly 1 mm in size)

bioluminescence, on the other hand, is light actually produced from within the organism. no external energy source! ok, technically we’re all solar powered either directly through photosynthesis, or indirectly through eating photosynthetic beings, but the light in this case is not just re-emitted sunlight, it is generated by a chemical reaction within the cells of the organism.

light, in general, is produced when an electron absorbs energy, is excited (moved) to a higher orbit, and releases a photon (packet of energy) as it falls back to its home orbit. in bioluminescence, that excitation happens due to a chemical reaction. luciferins are the chemicals involved in making light. luciferases are enzymes that catalyze the oxidation reactions that produce the light (via the oxidation of the luciferins).

in many cases, the organism does not produce its own luciferins, but obtains them through “trophic interactions,” in other words, they have to eat the right thing to be able to shine. (can you relate?) because, get this: some luciferins are related to chlorophyll- some of them only require the rearrangement of a few metal ions in order to switch from chlorophyll to luciferin. scientists speculate that the organisms at the bottom of the food web who are capable of making this compound may actually convert back and forth between the two on a diel basis (opting for chlorophyll during daylight hours when the absorption of sunlight is key, and switching to luciferin after dark when it’s time to emit light instead). wow, neat!

shine on you crazy diamond

now i am going to attempt to think across disciplines and touch on the spiritual significance of these crazy light makers. filling our heads with a bunch of data is all well and good, but what about tapping into some of that dinoflagellate and firefly medicine? what can we learn about our own souls by dwelling on the attributes of ctenophores and cephalopods? spirit guides (or in quinn’s recent terminology “spirit guys” as he announced of the dinosaurs he was drawing the other night) are our animal and plant brothers and sisters, to whom we can look for information about how we process the world around us. there is a lot of wisdom in nature, waiting there for us to just open our eyes and receive it. traditionally, a lot of literature on spirit helpers (also known as totem animals) focus mainly on vertebrates (birds, mammals, perhaps a reptile or two, occasionally a fish) and rarely you can even read about spirit guidance from the plant people, and even more rarely, from invertebrate animals, such as spiders or dragonflies, for instance. as we all know, however, most of nature is not made up of vertebrates, so i believe it is important to look far beyond the charismatic megafauna for the truths nature holds for us. i will be the first to admit that i go for the charismatic megafauna types, don’t get me wrong: dolphins are my numero uno totem, but i like to look to the sea urchins and the kelp for their wisdom too. the bioluminescent beings seem to have their own special brand of wisdom to gift us with. small though they might be, they are responsible for most of the light produced in the majority of the ocean’s volume! i am only going to go into detail on a small handful of light producing critters and their medicine, just to give you an idea of some of the endless possible ways you can use the spiritual truths found in nature to enhance your own spiritual walk.

dinoflagellates

these are single celled marine algae that make up a huge part of the base of the food web in the ocean. some are photosynthetic (over half), some heterotrophic (that means they engulf/eat other organisms), some are endosymbiotic zooxanthellae (meaning they live inside other creatures, for example corals, in a symbiotic mutualistic relationship) and still others parasitic. shall we say, they’re adaptable? always a nice trait to embody. so wait a minute, are they plants or are they….? yep, as heterotrophic photosynthetizers, dinoflagellates blur the lines between plant and animal, which makes me love them all the more. i think it’s important to realize that classification (taxonomy) is always a best guess/approximation and that nothing is ever truly black and white. i love organisms that defy our dualistic paradigms.

pyrocystis fusiformis dinoflagellate (~1mm)

dinoflagellates bioluminesce only upon disturbance. now there’s a spiritual tool for you- to learn how to glow your brightest when life sends you disturbances. they are responsible in large part for the glowing bow wakes, dolphin trails, and sparkling beach sand: if you drive your boat into them, they glow. again, we do not know exactly why they glow, but some speculate that they glow when a predator arrives to munch them, perhaps as a distraction; others think they do it to attract yet larger predators to the scene to take care of their predators. all i know is there is a lot to be learned from these 1-mm small beings. small is mighty! indeed, dinoflagellates are the organisms responsible for harmful algal blooms known as red tides- they are powerful indeed and not to be trifled with!

ctenophores:

off the top of my head, some of the attributes of comb jellies or ctenophores, who belong to their very own phylum (ctenophora) are: symmetry, simplicity, efficiency, flow, buoyancy, transparency… yet for all their grace and slow, quiet, twinkliness, they are voracious carnivores, again capable of achieving devastating results when too many of them bloom in one place. they waste no energy, producing nothing but light (no heat) from their glow, which in the case of ctenophores is again, maybe a defensive response, kind of a fake-out smoke-screen strategy.

they’ve got rhythm- their cilia (the “combs” of comb jellies) beat in a coordinated, sequential way- think of doing “the wave” at a baseball stadium. something else they can do is incorporate the stinging nematocysts of the prey they consume into their own tentacles- another one of those handy skills to be packing.

fireflies:

fireflies are a type of beetle (not flies, after all) making up the family lampyridae. all the eggs and larvae, and many of the adults of the various firefly species can luminesce. the larvae (who eat slugs- now there’s a trait i like in a totem animal, preying upon my gardening nemesis!) are presumed to be broadcasting that “we don’t taste good” through their use of bioluminescence, while the adults (who light up their abdomens in flash dialogues) are thought to primarily use light in mate attraction. they are tricky, though, and in some cases fireflies have been observed to lure in members of other firefly species by mimicking that species’ flash type, then gobbling them up when they unsuspectingly land hoping to mate. fireflies may also use light as a defensive mechanism- making light is useful, and not at all reserved for just one strategy.

again, the reaction going on in fireflies to create the light gives off almost no heat; compare this nearly 100% efficiency to that of an electric light bulb, which loses 90% to heat and turns only 10% of the energy into light. how do they turn their love light on (and off?) well, the “exact mechanism has yet to be worked out.” translation: “we dunno.” (sounding familiar?)

the author begs your forgiveness for the scientific inaccuracy of these quick sketches- not intended for any kind of official use, just eye candy for my post!

dragonfish

i could not leave out dragonfish; though i did very little reading on them, other than in quinn’s copy of one nighttime sea, i couldn’t help but see the parallel between these dragons of the sea, and my dragons of the air, about which i posted a similar science-geek-spirit-helper-fest a few months back. these crazy deep-sea fish can produce light in both the blue-green portion of the spectrum, and the red. this red light is especially unique in the deep ocean, where it cannot be seen without special tricky adaptations, and points to a truth about light and vision- that not only does the organism have to have the equipment to produce the light, it also must be able to see it. in the deep sea, almost nobody retains the ability to see red, but these dragonfish are true visionaries, and they can use this special red light to all kinds of advantage in the darkest of dark environments. more little dragons doing awesome things.

choose your own glowing totem

many, many other species display bioluminescence- this is only a very tiny sampling. in fact, according to the review i quoted above, it is estimated that bioluminescence evolved over 40 times, independently, just in the marine environment. but if it’s so darn useful, why doesn’t every marine (or freshwater, or terrestrial) organism produce visible light? you guessed it- we dunno. there are hardly any cases of bioluminescence observed in freshwater- such a striking contrast with the glowing ocean. i highly recommend reading up on more of these fascinating organisms, and incorporating them as your very own glowy spirit helpers.

light up your life

“we rode back to the ship on a carpet of stars and comets and streaks of lightning- some of the most amazing bioluminescence i’ve ever seen. i leaned over the rail of the boat, watching the moon and the glowing feeding frenzy alternately” ~me, 3-17-01, mexico

want to go dancing on the stars, and swimming in sparkly water? it’s something i plan my vacation time around, and you can, too. a little internet searching can let you know what your best bet is for landing in a field of fireflies, or showing up on a beach at the most auspicious time for sparkling sand encounters. here on the oregon coast, i haven’t had any opportunities (yet!) to encounter bioluminescence, but now that quinn is a bit older, i plan to make it a priority for this summer to go walk on the beach under new moon darkness. summer is when nutrients and sunlight are more readily available to nourish plankton and also when we will be least likely to freeze our heinies off on the beach at night! happy coincidence. we hope to make an east coast pilgrimage in the warmer months, for a firefly encounter (oh yeah and to see family- just kidding, family is actually the priority but the fireflies will be a bonus!) i am also slated to be on a research cruise at the end of june, and am hopeful to see some bioluminescence while i’m out to sea.

here are some resources, if you want to do more reading:

the bioluminescence web page (full of illuminating info! including ways you can grow bioluminescent plankton at home– care to light up your homeschooling/unschooling science scene anyone?)

got older kids who want to see the (glowing) world? semesters at sea for high school and college students

here’s where i got some of my firefly info.

while you’re learning about bioluminescence, another aspect that is great to cover is conservation. like any other insect, fireflies are sensitive to the pesticides used so heavily in our current agricultural scheme. ocean health and plankton health are certainly sensitive to many anthropogenic disturbances as well. there are many rabbit holes to go down on this topic, but i’m refraining from mentioning too many depressing ones in this post- this one, i just wanted to let shine. 😉

~quinn’s forty sixth month~ stirring the pensieve

Posted on December 23, 2010 by marybethrew

~written november/december 2018~

by this time, the blog had taken on a life of its own, and i began documenting quinn’s happenings on a regular basis in ~a month of unschool~ posts the next month, which then transitioned to ~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ posts. as such, this feels like the last chapter needed in this series to complete the splice in the one unbroken line.

unschooling was proving to be a good fit for the learning style of quinn. he was always inclined to follow his interests in an in-depth way, learning pertinent life skills as a matter of course. he was exploring numbers and taking on math all on his own. he would tell me things like, “2 and 2 more, and then another 1, is 5!” he did the same with subtraction, during the course of play. “you have 4 but you take away 2 so you have 2 left.” his boat-y observations about the letters on a page were a great example of how he constructed his own meaning of the world around him, including the o buoys and q crab traps he encountered.

in addition to chronicling the learning-oriented activities and events that took place each month, the monthly learning posts have become a place where i’ve processed some of the different layers of his learning style and personality. by this magical age of three, many of the most quinn-ish aspects of quinn-ness had emerged and i was starting to observe and take notice of them. the blog has been a bit like dumbledore’s pensieve in which i have been able to store memories, and at various times revisit them, swirl them around, and discover connections among the memories and the present days’ events, coming to understand both more fully. i find it incredibly fitting that the memories in the pensieve seem very much alive, as though pulsating with bioluminescence.

by this time i had put my finger on one tricky aspect of quinn’s personality, in that he has a serious perfectionist side. i can easily relate, and i think that was why i could identify this in him at a young age. i had noticed that quinn was easily upset when he was unable to execute his artistic goals to his liking, and he would spend months not drawing. his drawing skills would eventually catch up to his drawing goals, and then he would enter a new phase of drawing willingly, often to the exclusion of other activities. when his goals and skills were out of sync, he bided his time. part of this had to do with his style and personality, my watery ebb-and-flow dude, but part of the ebb was/is definitely an aversion to imperfections and mistakes.

during this particular month, quinn realized he could just turn the page to a new sheet of paper when a mark went onto the paper he didn’t like. he then filled an entire 100-page spiral notebook with drawings in one weekend. attention span was certainly not his issue, and i recorded that three hours elapsed one saturday while he stood at his play table, drawing storm waves, boats, and people so adorable i could have eaten the pages. his people had heads, stick arms and legs, with blobs for hands and feet. he would dictate, “you have to attach the eyes,” and make sure peoples’ legs were inside the boat so they would not fall in the water.

his narrative still saturated with boat imagery, he told me about a drawing in which we made our daily commute in a boat instead of a car; he told of filling the streets with water by poking holes in the road. of all the places in the world to be thinking of sending a boy with an imagination so preoccupied with boats, a few days in venice seem especially apt.

this month was when the milks seemed just like buoys to quinn! and we baked our two big green pumpkin boats and turned them into pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins, and we still had pumpkin left over to make pancakes and store some in the freezer. my kitchen helper left no eggshells in the mix, was getting better at filling and leveling the teaspoon, and i didn’t have to stir anymore- he was very thorough!

delving into these archives, i found that the series seemed to be woven through with a few themes revolving around personhood. quinn was solidly self-possessed, and i was heading in that direction myself, engaging in a lot of self-reflection, and contemplating what freedom meant to me. having begun to establish healthy boundaries, i was more free to pour my energy into actualizing my potential in areas i cared about, such as parenting. quinn and i weathered storms, to be sure, as i climbed the mountain of parenting ideals. life would not come to rest in some static pose in the rain shadow, but we would find that we were camping there more frequently than we were trudging through gales on the weather side.

when he was an infant, and the struggle was being bitten while he nursed, i had to learn not to clench my own jaw. when he was three and having a tantrum, i had to learn that there was a prerequisite amount of connection needed to see us through those storms. now that he is eleven, i am seeing the parallel to the learning i’m doing now, which is maybe more advanced in that it is both about clenching my jaw less and front-loading connectedness. one of the key components to a thriving parent-child relationship all along has been attention to my own self-care, and looking back makes me want to give myself a high-five for steady improvement.

quinn and i took a trip to portland, and given our previous month’s trip having been so hotly contested by my coparent, i did not tell quinn ahead of time, so that i would not have to ask him to keep a secret. when it was time to go, i told him, “we’re going on a road trip tonight to see r and s and t!”

quinn said, “i like them!”

he was quiet for a while, but then spoke up again:

“dada says that one of the mamas is sicker than you are, mama… (pause)… r is the guy who dada says is sicker than you and she has problems in her head even more than the problems you have in your head.”

“whoa buddy. that’s heavy stuff. how did it feel to have dada say that to you?”

“when he said that i wanted to cry.”

“oh yeah? you felt sad, huh? i think i would feel sad too, if someone said that about my friend.”

“yeah (repeating the ‘sicker than you’ part)”

“oh. well, sweetie, i want you to know that you are the one who gets to decide what you think about people. even if dada or i think something, it doesn’t mean it has to be true for you.”

(repeating, “but dada says…”)

“so boo, do you think that about r?”

“no. i like r. she’s my friend!”

“me too. i like r, and i don’t think she is sick.”

a few minutes passed. i can still picture the low winter sun glancing off the water’s surface as we crossed the bridge.

“quinn, how are you feeling about it now?”

“i’m not sad anymore.”

the court-mandated parenting class i took when i originally planned on establishing custody paperwork had engraved in my mind that kids derive a lot of their self-esteem from their image of their two parents, and therefore any trash talking about the other parent in front of the child, while it can influence their kid’s opinions, is done at the child’s expense. so i had redoubled my commitment to never doing it. ultimately, without any need for trash talking, i trusted my kid to figure out whether his other parent is a person of integrity, without me ever having to burden him with my opinion. conversely, if i helped quinn maintain a center from which he could determine his own opinions in spite of outside input, he might stand to be less vulnerable should one parent choose to engage in trash talk.

r and i took the boys to omsi. we spent oodles of time in the room full of nerf balls and vacuum tubing. we played musical wrenches and played with electricity in the physics room. we dunked and excavated in the watershed model. we got to hold a leaf bug. quinn put together a human skeleton puzzle. we used to go to omsi all the time, but it was a different experience with quinn being older and more capable, since i could actually look around a little bit myself. i found a cool book called while a tree was growing about all the historical events that happened during the lifespan of a certain giant sequoia tree- it was a cool blend of science and history. when i got home i ordered it for 48 cents for a christmas present. s was into drawing mazes, and he made one for quinn, and showed him what a maze is all about. the boys played with cars, driving them down the ramp. quinn pretended everything was a boat. r fed us like royalty, quinn ate 27 little oranges, 15 chocolate chip cookies, and a few bites of burrito, and i got to do lots of mama chatting. i made a side trip to visit a friend at print arts northwest, where quinn made beaded candy canes at a table with four adult women, and i looked at art. q told the women his favorite colors are “green, pink and orange.” this was the first time i had ever heard him name any color a favorite other than green!

quinn told me on the ride home, “i had such a good time at r’s house.” i figured it would be so fresh in his mind, and he’d mention something about it to his dad, but at least after the fact, it wouldn’t ruin the trip. when coparent asked me if we had gone to portland, i simply answered truthfully. whereas the prior month, mr. hyde had lectured me about the requirements “by law” that i inform the other parent when taking his son out of town, this time i got dr. jekyll: “so, what is the policy on that? i’m confused.” i agreed i would like to know if he were taking quinn somewhere, without agreeing that i would notify him. i certainly did not apologize or in any way indicate that what i had done was wrong.

i never did confront him on the trash talk. at earlier times he would turn it back on me, denying things he had said about me completely with, “maybe he got the terminology from you.” (gaslighting alert! looking back now with an understanding of such dynamics, it is so easy to see.) from all these years later, i hold these truths to be self-evident: that i had good parental judgment and the right to do what i wanted to do, and go where i wanted to go, with my son on my own parenting time.

what is also clear to me years later is that i stand behind my then-conviction to maintain quinn’s personal integrity, to encourage rather than discourage him to decide for himself on matters large and small, whenever possible. it can be unwieldy to parent a three-year-old with a strong self-knowledge and definitive agenda, in a world where the prevailing parenting paradigm revolves around compliance. with my eye on the longer-term goal of quinn knowing, absolutely within his own soul, who he is, and as a side benefit, knowing who his parents are, i have always encouraged him to be in touch with what he thinks. this has been worth every bit of awkwardness going against the mainstream.

this was the same month i posted that he knows himself in which he made stunningly self-aware statements about not going to school, and not belonging in a city. i was in awe, looking to him as a model, and hoping to catch up in the department of self-knowledge! i could already see the radical approach i was taking was starting to bear fruit.

one morning on the way to work (in the rainy semi-darkness of mid-december) we saw an owl fly out of a tree beside the road just before we crossed the bridge. since nobody was behind us, we waited at the stop sign a while and watched it fly again, down to the grass. we talked to it, telling it to stay safe and not go into the road. it flew back up into the tree. we drove across the bridge.

solstice this year fell on a full moon, and featured a full lunar eclipse! the timing of the eclipse didn’t allow for us to see it, but such a celestial backdrop seemed like the natural time for things like owls flying by my car on my morning commute.

we filled the house with the fragrance of cinnamon-applesauce ornaments, and cloves stuck in an orange. we made playdough (beet juice pink, reminds me of red violet), and painted all our buoys for our buoy garland every color of the rainbow. a long string of rainbow colored buoys is about the most fitting ending i can think of for a post series about fixing a broken line, finding a whole bunch of unexpected treasures, and turning them into a celebration.

~~~

~post-script~

as i tucked the pensieve back into its cabinet, i re-read each post and pondered how transformative this writing process has been. just due to the very act of saying yes and showing up to do this specific writing, my perception went through a dramatic shift. at first i perceived this line splice project as a repair that would be functional, but not necessarily pretty. i was on a mission to unstick myself in a certain aspect of my writing, because it occurred to me that this missing piece was holding me back from fully integrating my storyline. i went into it slightly intimidated, daunted by the things i knew i would revisit, and apprehensive about what i may have forgotten. i thought i would catalog memories, organize them into paragraphs, slicing away ugly or unneeded parts and maybe inserting a metaphor to tie them all together. however, by the end of the first one, i realized i had been remiss to think of it so clinically, and i had been so focused on how hard things were during that time, that i forgot how beautiful and joyful they had been. by the third post, there were rainbow connections and so many gems whose immense worth i could not have fathomed at the time, but which were now radiant given the new angle of the sunlight shining upon them. i gained some momentum through several more posts as i savored the flower petals i was able to hold in the palm of my hand once more. and i reveled in the broader view having come full circle up the spiral staircase. the connections zigzagging from then to now and back to then, all reminding me that integrating is about making these important connections, that this mending project is not just making the whole more functional, but also lending it strength. it will remain to be seen if i am now “unstuck” as i hope to be, but what i feel i can take away from all of this is what beauty you can make out of what was broken and left behind, if you’re resourceful.

it turned out that the broken ends of the strands of my rope were just another magical place on the edge of things, the crack where the light gets in.

so i lay my line splice down here on the threshold of another winter solstice 8 years hence, another darkest part of another year, to hopefully bring a little light to the darkness.

mb

magic & bioluminescence

Tag Archives: bioluminescence