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I also enjoyed last week's classes. From a visual perspective/as a visual artist, it was fun to look at life abstractly; to be able to see all these seemingly random, painted lines and colors and patterns, and then realizing the significance of the subject I was looking at (the earth, a bee's eye, an atom etc). Wouldn't you be surprised to, after admiring a blue and green abstract canvas, find out that you were looking at a photograph of the earth, or a close up of something else that was important to you (like part of your iris (eye) or something)? Okay maybe this is just an artist thing. I really like seeing.

More than anything though, thinking about scale and the breakdown of life in last week's classes made me return to an issue that haunted me for awhile. Our bodies are made up of all these other pieces (macro molecules, atoms) that constitute life--they compose us-- but the atoms that make us are not actually ours. The issue is attachment and the whole idea of durability... everything is temporary. So what does it mean to "own" something? Even your hand is not the hand you were born with-- the atoms have all been replaced with new ones over time. Does that throw anyone else off as much as it did me? I took a creative writing class in my last semester of high school for which I wrote a piece in the style of NPR's "This I Believe" series. I sent it along to Prof Grobstein and he said I should post it on Serendip... of course it has a personal story enmeshed in it, but the observations and questions I ask via the story I tell are relevant to the way we think in this class. It's a piece I'm proud of, and it means a lot to me, but I am happy to share it.

If you go to my blog, you will find it there.