POETIC NARRATIVE

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PRELUDE

Where do you draw a line around your body?

Is it possible to say where you end and begin?

Perhaps you might point to your skin

As a border between inside and outside

But what about your breath, that takes in

And pours forth into the world around you?

Through the senses, we are threaded into

This entanglement with everything around us

We imagine the sun as a dazzling sphere in the sky

But the sun is also bursting forth in the trees overhead

And nourishing the cells in your body;

How do you end and begin, if sunlight is under your skin?

If we could see differently

We might see that everything flows into everything else

That we are made of rivers

Streams of life, surging across time

All you need to do

Is follow the current

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Existence begins as sunlight

Much of life on earth is a solar being

From the plant that drinks its golden rays

To make the sugars that nourish all animal life

We are all powered by energy from the sun

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When you entered this space, a particle of light left the sun

and began its journey across the galaxy

By the time you leave, this particle – a photon – will have

reached the earth

Travelling at the speed of light

Photons have been making this journey from the sun since time began

When the earth began to shape itself from clouds of dust

and elements, the debris of an exploded star

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Now the photon, a tiny wave full of powerful solar energy,

reaches the earth’s periphery

Passing through the layers of the atmosphere

To the surface, where plantlife has evolved to meet it:

Light reaches the tip of a leaf

And the photon lands on a chloroplast, the organ responsible

for greening energy from sunlight

If you could walk into this organ, it would be a glittering

auditorium of green, irradiated by the light particle it has evolved

to welcome

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In this room, the ingredients of life are made possible

In a ceaseless cycle of transformation

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The leaf has prepared for its meeting with sunlight, opening its pores,

like hundreds of tiny mouths, to drink carbon from the atmosphere

Carbon which is created by you, filling the air as you exhale

Using your outbreath, the plant gathers the photons

Binding them tightly between carbon atoms

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And now, this binding of presences

Of sunlight and carbon

Meets a water molecule, sucked up by roots from the soil

And sped to the leaf through infinite corridors of green

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Water molecules are like diamonds; precious and near

impossible to break

But the plant has the power of the sun on its side

With the force of light, the photon splits the water molecule apart

Tearing one component from another

In an ecstatic release of energy

An outpouring of hydrogen, electrons and oxygen

Presences the plant needs to nourish itself, and to create

the conditions for life

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The sun’s energy passes into the electrons

Charging them with ancient electricity

And now these solar-powered electrons propel hydrogen

across a membrane

A complex alchemy used to absorb carbon dioxide

from the atmosphere

And rearrange its atoms to create sugars

This vital substance, used to make stems and leaves, branches and

flowers, anything the plant needs to grow

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This transformation is an everyday miracle

Taking place all around us

In hundreds of chloroplasts in each plant cell

And in hundreds of plant cells in every leaf

Each plant is a city of light, spinning energy from the sun

Into new life

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This harnessing of light is the foundation of our existence

When we absorb sugars from a plant

We are eating sunlight

That has been locked in a solar embrace with the plant’s molecules

And by its leaves we live:

The plant drinks the sun and exhales

This timeless cycle releases an outbreath of oxygen

Which spills into the atmosphere

Filling it with breathable air

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Now, step out into the world

And take your first breath

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Image: Observations on Being by Marshmallow Laser Feast

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