Beauty.

Watch this.

 

Mr. Beebe says, "Is that your son?..."

Mr. Emerson replies, "He's saying his creed."

And what's George's creed?  Beauty.  Joy. 

Prionitus lanceolata

Speaking of seaweed, I've developed quite an obsession with it.  My appreciation for macro algae started innocently enough:  some golden kelp washed up on the beach at low tide, pink coralline branches standing stock-still in a tide pool, little bits of what looked like crenelated green cellophane scattered across sand and rocks.  They were simply lovely!  And I had a camera.  The more pictures I took, the more questions I had.  Questions generated research, research generated more questions.  I found the algal world not especially well delineated, with very little entry-level literature.  Still, I read and read, comprehending only in flicks and glimmers.  Like a titrant dripping from a buret, flashing momentarily phenolphthalein pink, those minute flicks and glimmers waxed and began to hold.  Others ran together building whole moments of illumination.  As the light continues to grow, my perception increases, and I find myself in awe of the intricate beauty.

Cryptopleura ruprechtiana (probably)

I've been working on a seaweed project with a veritable algal genius.  My contribution to the project has been loads of photos, the project's contribution to me has been the opening of a mentored education.  Not just any mentor, either, but a super-geek in the field I'm most especially interested!  I went to my new guru's office the other day.  It's on a major university campus, tucked deep in the belly of the herbaria.  The boundaries of her office space, instead of being delineated by walls, were a hedgerow of rolling archival shelves filled with thousands of dried botanical specimens.  Along one side, like tidy boxwoods, antique scientific journals (some in Japanese and Korean) claimed their space.  Books, journals, photographs, and specimens (both mounted and loose) trailed off her desk and onto a somewhat incongruous Persian rug.  I've not been many places that instantaneously felt like home, this was one of the exceptions.  We worked together for a little while identifying the seaweeds in the photographs I'd taken, then she set me to work nearby at a small table where mounting plates had been pushed aside to make room for my lap top.  I pulled up a rolling desk chair that had likely been birthed before me, and clacked away, entering into the computer the things I'd just learned.  Joy.  Yup.  No other word for it.

While I don't think I'll climb into a tree to declare it at a picnic, I think George has got it right. 

Microcladia coulteri epiphyte growing on Chondracanthus harveyanus (?)