Taking a Break From the Nightmare For Moments of Wonder

Reality is both much grander and more astonishing than we think

Photo by Ivan Rojas on Pexels

The nightmare arises in daylight now

 

Every morning, another gut punch. Another pillar of the society we thought would hold steady gets knocked down. We’re unwilling passengers in a car driven toward a cliff by power-crazed madmen intent on destruction.

They can’t seem to grasp that if the whole car goes over the edge, they’ll go with it. They can’t conceive of their own demise, or else they’re so terrified of it that they’re unconsciously compelled to summon it. 

So here we are, steered toward ruin by hapless pyromaniacs who are determined to burn everything down and us with it. A cadre of fiddling Neros, gleefully reveling in cruelty.

Example: On February 20, the White House released a video of shackled immigrants being loaded onto a deportation flight. The White House captioned the video “ASMR” — which, in case you’re out of a certain twist of the pop culture loop, stands for “autonomous sensory meridian response.” 

The TLDR on ASMR: It’s said to be a pleasant, warm, tingle that, once triggered, begins at the scalp and travels down the neck and spine.

In other words, the White House invites viewers to experience pleasure as they witness the helpless misery of chained and bound deportees.

Yes, things are that bad. It’s for real. 

There are times when I think I’m too old to deal with this shit. There are other times when I think I’m lucky not to be young. Sometimes those times happen at the same time.

But while evil clowns busily construct the very hellscape from which they once promised to protect us (turns out it only takes one obscenely wealthy immigrant to steal untold thousands of American jobs) — it’s also true, and in a sense much more true, that miracles and wonders surround us.

And I’m old enough to know that, and to rediscover it often.

So let’s pause for a minute and see what there is to learn

Many, many years ago — back when I was a preteen — I read T.H. White’s retelling of the King Arthur legends, The Once and Future King. It’s one of my foundational stories, offering deep truths such as might does not equal right and instilling a sense of wonder even when things look grim.

At one point when the young Arthur is rocked by uncertainty and disillusionment, his mentor Merlin offers him a remedy I’ve never forgotten:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Recently, quite by accident, I have learned of some natural phenomena that are nothing short of astounding. To offer you respite from evil lunatics’ antics, I share them with you. 

Ancient starlight, birds’ eyes, and quantum entanglement

How do birds, or butterflies, or salmon, or any other critters that migrate find their way over vast distances to the exact feeding ground, nesting tree, or spawning pool they’re aiming for? It’s a mystery that scientists, poets, and regular slobs like me have pondered ever since, well, ever.

Some of the once-upon-a-time theories about where birds go and how they get there sound bizarre now. In the 17th Century, English minister and scientist Charles Morton published a treatise on why certain birds disappeared in the winter.

They flew, he explained at length, to the moon. And back. Every year.

I guess at the time it made sense. I mean, where else would they go? Meanwhile, one popular belief about migratory hummingbirds — some of whom whirr on their teensy wings for 8,000 miles on a rotational yearly loop between Alaska and Mexico — holds that they hitchhike on the backs of geese.

Alas, no wee feathered would-be ride-sharers are sticking out their feathery thumbs at flocks of geese who look like they might be heading to Acapulco, as much as I wish that were true.

Nowadays we (as if I belong in the “we” that posits such things) believe migrating birds orient themselves by multiple means, like old-timey aeronauts. They can use the sun, the stars, the paths of mountain ranges and rivers, and even their sense of smell and hearing.

But here’s the thing: even without any of those things, birdies can still find their way — thanks, apparently, to the Earth’s magnetic field.

Which should be impossible. Because that magnetic field ought to be too weak for any animal to detect. Like, way weaker than your average fridge magnet. 

It may be that what’s going on with birds is far stranger than hitchhiking on geese or flapping off to the moon.

My husband alerted me to a recent RadioLab episode interview with bird migration researchers on this topic. And it blew my mind so much that for a while I forgot to be in despair about the dystopia race our nation seems to be in with Russia and Hungary.

These researchers focused on one migratory owl species, the Northern saw-whet owl — a diminutive species that can find its way hundreds of miles back and forth to its seasonal feeding and mating grounds every year. 

While being ridiculously cute.

(Ridiculously cute) Northern Saw-Whet Owl: Image by Chris Tolman from Pixabay

To summarize the story that had my eyes nearly as wide as the saw-whet’s (my attempting to relate this is like a dog telling you what makes the car go, so keep that in mind and listen to the podcast episode):

Turns out the backs of these owls’ eyeballs are sort of open-source, in that beneath the feathery facial mask their eyes are pretty much hanging out there — where they can be stuck by starlight.

Mind you, we’re talking about light that has traveled for millions of years before it reaches Earth and hits the back of a saw-whet owl’s eyeball.

And that starlight supercharges, by, like, a thousand times, the bird brain’s sensitivity to the magnetic field. But even weirder (and far harder to explain), it activates the electron particles in cryptochrome molecules in the bird’s eye, and those electrons become quantumly entangled, which means they can be influenced by other particles no matter how distantly separated they are in space.

I hope you’re not waiting for me to make quantum physics make sense to you. 

Long story short, the interaction of these ancient starlight-inspired particles essentially creates a chemical compass in the owl’s brain. And that’s how a bird the size of a soda can commutes from Canada to the Carolinas or Nevada twice a year.

If that doesn’t ignite your sense of the miraculous, check your pulse.

Glass frogs

The same week I stumbled upon the RadioLab episode, I happened to catch Apple TV’s The Secret Lives of Animals. The theme for this episode was “Protecting Yourself” and as you’d expect, it portrayed a number of the defenses animals have developed to evade predators. 

The wildlife photography in shows like these is so stellar that I’ve almost become cavalier about it. 

Cool, an octopus that evades a pursuing flounder by crawling into a scallop shell. Nice, a spider that builds a convincing decoy. What else is on?

But wait. 

A tiny frog hops onto a broad leaf somewhere in a South American rainforest. That’s fine; the thumbnail-size frog is so light the leaf doesn’t even wobble. Also, the frog is the same color as the leaf, so no problem.

Except that from beneath, the frog casts a distinctly frog-shaped shadow — one that could easily be seen by the (frog-eating) green parrot snake who is swiftly approaching.  

There is no way Froggie can flee in time. Instead, he hunches in his limbs to change his silhouette to a sort of lozenge shape. Then he draws all the blood in his body into his internal organs, leaving the rest of his body essentially transparent, and then retracts his organs, until all that can be seen of him is a tiny darkish splotch, like a spot on the leaf.

The hungry snake passes within a half inch of the frog, who remains motionless and effectively invisible. 

Once the danger passes, the frog reanimates, relaxes its organs, redistributes its blood, and hops off to spend another day as a member of the amphibian family Centrolenidae, also known as a glass frog.

In his wake, the glass frog leaves one frustrated snake and one marveling human, awash in wonder at the astonishing occurrences taking place among our fellow organisms here on our blue space marble.

Elon Musk can you-know-what off to Mars. The sooner the better. I’m sticking with the wonders of my home planet.