The World Through New Eyes

Happy National Write Down Your Story Day! (March 14, 2019)

Lest anyone wonder why I seem to be spending lots of time answering a question no one has actually asked (as in “tell us the history of your life”) I want to preface today with this clarification: This whole “Story of Me” business is about sharing what I think might be relatable parts of my story that become relevant as we go forward exploring the larger “we” and “us” stories. It includes wishy-washy things like my feelings and values, and is largely about my identity and my journey of discovering myself. We all have a foundational story about who we are and what we care about that we need to tap into to be our strongest, and most “authentic” selves. The arc of our lives is long, but tends to bend toward some story or theme of our values, right?

Okay, so, jumping back in.

Back to (Grad) School

In grad school I learned a lot (more) about birds (and frogs and fish and mammals, and insect antennae, etc.), about how things function, ecologically, and I developed a much more filled out picture of the sweeping transformations of life and land across our planet through eons of time.

I remember this one really early (late 90’s?) computer animation showing the outline of the continent of South America through 1000s (millions?) of years, modeled against rising and falling sea levels through those years. I never could have imagined that sea levels could rise and fall enough to transform whole continents the way I was watching them do in this data-based animation…over and over again. South America morphed into unrecognizable shapes as the Amazon Basin, multiple times, completely disappeared under the ocean, only to reappear again years later. Meanwhile, only the ç-shaped ring of the Andes on the western side of continent remained through it all. Watching the endless shifting of the continental outline, in and out of a shape I could recognize, was enthralling.

I remember at another point having this realization that all my life I had this basic implicit sense of how solid and static the world was, but that this sense was just a by-product of our short lives. In fact, the earth, and the life on it, has never, and will never, stand still. For every shoreline and landscape and mountain and ecosystem and animal we know, there are millions of lifetimes of them that have come and gone that we can’t even imagine. That’s important to know. And to internalize. It’s a healthy reminder that we are just the latest thing. Not the first, or the last.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson lays it out more vividly and beautifully in Cosmos, The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth

I also remember where I was that one day during grad school when I saw a newspaper headline about standing water at the North Pole. Standing water. At the North Pole. That’s not the world I had been born into. No, I was born into a world where the North Pole was a permanently frozen place. This new reality rippled through me: the vaguely disquieting feeling we were all seeing geological-scale changes in our own lifetimes.

In addition to perception-altering realizations like these, grad school was a whole world unto itself of experiences. Not coincidentally, as an experience-hungry, nature-lover/bird-watching enthusiast, I used my research to create opportunities to go do fieldwork in exotic locals. I studied manakins, which live all over Central and South America. I studied how they made sounds with their wings: I got to look at and draw structures under microscopes (the feathers, muscles and wing bones), and I also got to pursue trying to video-record birds in the wild making their sounds. On top of that, I was in a “museum” school. A school that was still manifesting a >200 year old tradition of scholars working on and in a collection of scientific specimens. That is a whole world unto itself, and it has been a huge part of my life too, so there is lots I could talk about here—about killing animals for science, for instance—but I don’t want to get into that, at least not now.

Suffice it to say that through grad school I had the privilege to examine and savor the many wonders of biological diversity on planet earth. I filled in a vivid mental world full of colors and sounds from places faraway in both space and time, and was able to discover for myself just a few the endless stories of how the world we live in now came to be.

But what came next, building through my time at Cornell, was essentially an identity crisis, and the beginnings of that crisis were laid years before in tensions I felt in my younger years.

Ceratopipra erythrocephala, the Golden-headed Manakin, in Tiputini Biodiversity Station, Ecuador, 2010.