BEGONIAS & BASIL SEEDLINGS IN SUNLIGHT

Maybe sometime in your life you've had a potted begonia perched on your kitchen windowsill and maybe one winter morning as sunlight streamed through the window you saw how the begonia's succulent flesh glowed, seeming to emit more light than possibly it could been gathering into itself. And maybe you stood and stared at the begonia feeling a special kind of tranquility and sense of rootedness that for the rest of the day glowed inside like the sunlight had in the begonia.

My life has been graced with many such moments, and here in my present tropical heat and humidity I've been remembering them, for I have basil seedlings emerging in a tray, and in the sunlight they glow with the same thoughtful music as my begonias once did. Seeing them sets me adrift in lengthy old-man reveries.

For example, maybe precise sequence of the DNA base-pairs that code for photosynthesis -- which first arose in our ancestors the oceanic plankton at the dawn of aerobic photosynthesis 2.4 billion years ago -- composes some kind of deep-seated universal melody that profoundly resonates with its sister melodies, or harmonics or echos or ghosts among our human heartstrings.

And yet, the whole thing is mechanical. The Sun's energy all aglow here on Earth emits from nuclear fusion, a process that, once ignited in the Sun's core, pursues its agenda like clockwork to the end, all in accordance with E=MC2. And in Earth's plants all chemical doings required for photosynthesis are spelled out, step by step as in a lab manual, in the cells' DNA.

And that DNA issues other orders, too, for example commands and procedures for reproduction, and not only the reproduction of our exact selves, but beings a little different, in short, to reproduce in a way that over time things evolve, evolve toward more and more that's smarter and smarter, and ever more sensitive and alert, everything ever more beyond what it already is.

And so, what I experience before a sunlight-charmed begonia or basil seedling does seem to go a tiny bit beyond pure mechanism. By engendering these thoughts, feelings and yearnings, it's as if I'm being drawn into some kind of realm aglow with pure presence-of-the-moment, like the flesh of a remembered begonia, or a basil seedling, bathed in radiance right now.