Pete strikes again. After publishing, "Mountain" last week my friend directed me towards an NPR story covering an exchange with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. When asked where trees come from, Feynman responded, "from out of the air!"
He explains that trees are 95% carbon dioxide. The NPR blogger, Robert Krulwich, goes on to write, the tree "'eats' air, chomps down on airborne carbon dioxide, then uses sunshine to pull the carbon dioxide apart, gets rid of the oxygen, which it 'spits back into the air,' says Feynman, 'leaving the carbon and water, the stuff to make the substance of the tree.'... Water is in the ground, right? Water is not in the air. Ah, says Feynman, but how did water get into the ground? 'It came mostly out of the air, didn't it?'"
I am many kinds of nerd, but not a science nerd. Which is why I quoted so much text. If I tried to reframe that content in my own words, chances are I would slightly mischaracterize the information. With all of that context out of the way, my yogini imagination is swimming.
I'm going to take exception with a few prepositions and other words in his quote :)
ReplyDeleteTrees use air; they don't come from and they aren't composed of air. They basically break down air and water, using sunshine, to form carbon, i.e., living material, or tree. But a tree starts from itself, be it the smallest bit of carbon wrapped up in a seed.
And water IS in the air. The atmosphere is composed of many gases and elements, one of which is water in the air (that's what humidity is, for instance... more water than normal.) And when the water in the air gets heavy enough, it condenses and forms rain.
Pedantic semantics over :)
So anyway, to bring it back to my take on yoga - we take things that are a part of us, like air, or things that seem hard to hold onto or hard to master, like water, and out of that with time, practice, and a sunny attitude along the way, we can form tall, timeless, strong things like trees.
I'll take it! Well put!
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