If Seeds Could Only Talk

I just read about a 2,000-year-old date seed that scientists successfully germinated in Israel. How incredible! It's like a time capsule of sorts, maybe the closest thing we have to time travel. The date plant is the only one of its kind, in an extinct lineage. I can only imagine the nerve-wracking weight of responsibility the cultivator of that seed must have felt. And now it is a three-foot-tall sprouting piece of history, with a tantalizing array of ancient genetic diversity in every cell. Nature and science are truly amazing!

I'm sitting at the lab on a Sunday evening, waiting to go watch the Tony Awards with some fellow theatre fans. The sun is glittering on the water, and in the yellow glow a line of twenty pelicans or so flew across my field of view. I love watching them glide on their big wings, with their long beaks pointing assuredly in their direction of flight. They rise and fall gently one after the other, each following the path of the one before.

There are some otters paddling around in the river, flapping and splashing their feet. When I think, I mean really think about this environment I'm in, I can't believe my luck. And yet it is somehow possible to get so wrapped up in the business of completing tasks that this amazing setting gets taken for granted. My goal is to look at it each day with fresh eyes, fresh excitement. Never for granted, I remind myself. Never for granted.