MOST OF THE BLOSSOMS HAVE fallen, the burning bushes are blazing scarlet, and they whisper in unison one word: autumn. The crozzled old sycamore in the front yard and the magnolia by my bay window still shake bushy heads of green leaves. But slowly, imperceptibly to my eyes, the chlorophyll seeps away for another year, and the smallest dilution of color begins, a little more each hour, each day, until one day, today for instance, I notice a lightening in the forest and the leaf palette beginning to change. They’re not cued by the shortening days but by the lengthening nights. Trees can’t absorb water from cold soil as fast as it evaporates from their leaves, so to avoid drying out they drop all their leaves. But first they absorb the nutrients, in the process sucking out the green, unmasking the reds and oranges that were there all along. But in big cities, full of artificial light, trees become confused and shed their leaves later in the season. If longer light confuses the trees, what must it do to humans?
Despite the chill, there’s still much to treat the senses. At dawn all over America, sunflowers are now turning east and bowing toward the sun. The shaded side of each stem grows faster than the sunny side, and that tilts the flower faces to the light. True believers, they follow the sun during the day, tracking from east to west. A flexible neck below the bud allows the head to turn, but when they bloom, opening into the bright yellow followers that carpet the prairies, the neck stiffens and they’re locked in rigid allegiance, most often facing east. A moment ago, instead of “faces,” I was going to say “flower,” but each sunflower is a throng, not one but a crowd of small florets. All the outer florets are sterile drones, the inner “sunflower seeds” ripe with possibility—another crowd of individuals. The wisdom of the swarm thrives at every level in nature, including our own societies and bodies. Planets gently tug on each other and the sun, which tugs at and is tugged on by other stars in the galaxy, in the process steering their shape and fate. Every thing is on the one hand a bundle of characteristics, and on the other all the sensations we feel in its presence. We encounter objects with the whole body, including the object that is the body. Our individual cells combine to boost awareness and build organs and limbs, all of which muster each dawn to reawaken a sense of self. In every neuron and flake of skin, we resemble our one-celled pioneers. More a crowd than a family, our cells are sometimes sociable bedfellows, unknowing companions, secret accomplices. We’re really a society of enterprises—breathing, feeding, repairing, moving, planning, maturing. Every body runs millions of tiny factories that, together, coalesce into a self, an I, who feels whole, even unique at times, at other times alone. One life emerges. But every I is a we, a plural event. We compromise, collaborate, sometimes war with ourselves. Most of this is true for other animals as well.
Of course, it’s impossible to insert oneself completely into the subjective experience of another person, let alone another species with a different ensemble of senses and instincts. Its day may dawn elsewhere, not with crepuscular rays of sunlight spearing the clouds, but skink-low, or even underground. But there’s nothing like the rapture of losing oneself and blending with nature until you can consider the possibility that your molecules might once have been employed elsewhere, in a cuttlefish or a minstrel or a slime mold. It’s a humbling thought. We value our own subjective reality above that of any other organism. If we didn’t, perhaps we’d feel more kinship with other life-forms, even the lowliest. Consider a being with intelligence, personality, and a gift for learning—despite having no brain whatsoever—the unwittingly resourceful slime mold.
If I were a speck of slime mold, both one and many, a single-celled swarm, a gelatinous glob of peanut butter-like ooze on the forest floor, I would hustle after prey at a flat-out 1 mile per hour, streaming my slime one way, then another, to gobble up bacteria, protozoa, grass, and rotting leaves. Then I might bask on a sunny pile of bark, and jettison a million spores, each to form a single-celled colony of its own, half plant, half animal, all hunger. Self-contained as a solitary regiment, at odd moments I would nonetheless feel a fierce beckoning, unexplained and unshakable, and then I would creep across the ground like a gloved hand to where another slime mold bivouacked. Letting down my walls, I’d surrender my identity and add my society to its, become one hunger, a superorganism with no brain to speak of, but clever and wily, and sublimely temporary, little more than an august mob of cells.