Distant worlds ship design
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And because we humans so readily see in trees metaphors for our emotional lives, how can this not be a living reminder that every loss reveals what we are made of - an affirmation of the value of a breakdown? Life and Loss Are One by Maria Popova. Enzymes begin breaking down the decommissioned chlorophyll, allowing the other pigments that had been there invisibly all along to come aflame. In spring and summer, when the days grow long and bright, chlorophyll saturates leaves as the tree busies itself converting photons into the sweetness of new growth.Īs daylight begins fading in autumn and the air cools, deciduous trees prepare for wintering and stop making food - an energy expenditure too metabolically expensive in the dearth of sunlight. Throughout a leaf’s life, four primary pigments course through its cells: the green of chlorophyll, but also the yellow of xanthophyll, the orange of carotenoids, and the reds and purples of anthocyanins. (Available as a print.)īut chlorophyll, which is yet to be fully understood, is not the only pigment in trees.
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Oak by the self-taught 19th-century naturalist, painter, and poet Rebecca Hey from The Spirit of the Woods - the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia of wild trees. We have no right to name a substance long-known, and to the story of which we have added only a few facts however, we will propose, without granting it any importance, the name chlorophyll, from chloros, color, and φυλλον, leaf: a name that would indicate the role it plays in nature. In a lovely touch of humility that distinguishes, always, the scientist from the explorer - the explorer, so eager to name the lands and landmarks he has “discovered” after himself - they wrote in their landmark paper:
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A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.Īlthough the human mind has puzzled over why leaves fall and change color at least as far back as Aristotle, chlorophyll - which shares chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood - was only discovered and named in 1817, by the French pharmacist-chemist duo Joseph Bienaimé Caventou and Pierre Joseph Pelletier. Chlorophyll allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree - the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches - then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere. Photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light. (Available as a print.)īut autumn is also the season of revelation, for the seeming loss unveils a larger reality: Chlorophyll is a life-force but it is also a cloak, and when trees shed it from their leaves, nature’s true colors are revealed. That dual awareness, after all, betokens the luckiness of death. Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives - each yellow burst in the canopy a reminder that everything beautiful is perishable, each falling leaf at once a requiem for our own mortality and a rhapsody for the unbidden gift of having lived at all.