A Bioluminecent Solstice
It’s just before dawn the day after the summer solstice, 2026.
I’ve been enjoying some thought experiments in my lil brain. For example, the high shining sun we are experiencing is just another star to some consciousness in some other neighborhood of the universe, perhaps some consciousness experiences this star as we might from our corner of the universe, a random dot of light in a night sky.
Heliocentric as we are, it is a seeming truth that we cannot be the only intelligible life in the universe, yes? Earth is just another planet in some other consciousnesses version of outer space. We are so located here that it is difficult for us to imagine that we are in someone else’s outer space. There is a tendency to imagine that earth is much less evolved than however we might imagine this other place to be; we speculate these other forms of life, their sense of awareness, to be much more evolved than what exists here. Perhaps. In some circles, there can be a fetishizing of this other place, its other consciousness, its life-forms.
Also, it’s possible that there are just differences. That these other places may have such utterly different forms of life that we would find stunning and amazing and humbling. But were they to come here might they have a similar experience?
As it becomes more mainstream to consider not just life in other places but that that life may be able to visit with us in some way, it makes sense to wonder what they might think about earth? Maybe these other consciousnesses do not center humans when earth is encountered, we tend to center humans but perhaps when looked at from out there, what most impresses is not “us”.
I have been contemplating that to this other speculated consciousness encountering life-on- earth perhaps they would be gobsmacked by all the beautiful bodies that exist here. The big blue water bodies that dominate from outer space, of course. But then the sheer multitude of exquisite bodies. Perhaps, they immediately apprehend the totality of all the different manifestations of bodies that are earth. Fleshy bodies and stony bodies. Squishy bodies and furry bodies. Plant bodies. Sky bodies. Maybe they would understand, without difficulty, that the way bodies fill out this specific planet in outer space is unlike anything anywhere else?
There’s a passage in “Is a River Alive” I keep returning to. Macfarlane is walking at night in the Ecuadorian mountains with a renowned mycologist.
“I see that the trunks, stumps, and fallen branches around us are all glowing with a light that is different in kind to any I have seen before… I pick up a fragment of what feels like wood but looks more like radiant water. ‘The light in this one seems to be rippling,’ I say.”
The mycologist, Giuliana Furci, shares that this is mycelial bioluminescence. The planetary fascial weave, the fungal hyphae is lit, literally. And, Macfarlane says it shimmers. Life shimmers for those with eyes to see. It ripples and waves, even you reading this are an encapsulated (sort of), amalgamated, pulsating being. Maybe your brain is shimmering like mycelial bioluminescence when you read and imagine other worlds within this world we share.
Maybe this other life form from somewhere else just can’t fathom the beauty of it all. It;s not like where they’re from. All these bodies shine, to them, like stars right here on our earth.
Let’s go into the sea and visit a sea body, a crustacean body, the mother-of-pearl, with the phenomenal writer Mandy-Suzanne Wong, from her stunning essay collection, “Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl”.
Her diary is her shell; her archive is her body. Her skin secretes remembrances of light and motion; she shapes and colors the conflicts between her wish for peace and her sense of all encompassing complexity. She weaves oceanic undulations in aragonite, paints in fantastic colors, colors quivering and flowing, metamorphosing each time a thought twinkles her imagination. Were we to shrink and peek into her private cave, her secret studio inside her shell, we would see a silver sky teeming with fluid aurora, sparkling and undulating blue-purples, magentas, and green-golds the like of which the painter has never seen outside her dreams.
“Her archive is her body.” Wha?! Bodies as archives. We know this, are fascinated by this, our layered bodies are archives of our existence, our tissues contain our ancestors in the present. Maybe the light that courses through us isn't just a chemical reaction but life’s yearning for itself.
Two writers, two descriptions of two totally different types of life, two different forms of bodies. The blue planet is a place of what seems to be a nearly incomprehensible, to us here in human form, embodiment. Bodies go awry too. I’m not minimizing the suffering of bodies. Yet, bodies suffer here amidst this backdrop of what is magic and also utterly mundane for its abundance; even within the shifts of climate that are transforming life on the blue planet.
The teachers I follow say we need a prefigurative imagination to work with change. It’s a tricky concept and one I think about lots. I can’t know the future, mine nor the planet’s, only that I exist in this present, in this body, surrounded by other bodies that I get to call home. I’d like to end with Giuliana:
“‘What we have here this evening is nothing!’ says Giuliana. ‘If you hit the right night, in the right place, you can see all the veins of the forest lit up - you can see that everything is connected!’ Then she murmurs, perhaps to herself, ‘No one is without another.’”
Thanks for reading!
Michael
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