Recognition

I have a very wonderful friend with whom I share many interests and pastimes. We both like the coffee shop/bookstore atmosphere, where we talk about personal drama, dancing, movies, politics and any other number of things until we get kicked out when the place closes. We dance waltz and salsa together. We watch Battlestar Galactica on his couch and make food and play with the kitten. We've only known each other for about three months, but he is by far the best friend I've made in a long time. His Christmas gift to me was a bonsai tree. It was a very thoughtful gift.

Plantses are my passion and I have a fairly extensive amalgam of knowledge about them, which I began earnestly accumulating when I was nine or ten years old. I often doubt this deeply absorbed knowledge because it doesn't appear to help me at my day job and I think it ought to. That's partly because much of this early knowledge is about horticulture and not biology, so it runs parallel to the information that I learned in college. It's not useless, but it is essentially irrelevant to phytochrome pathways and RNA extraction. However, I was so devoted to learning about gardening and ornamental plants that even details and facts I haven't reviewed in years still surface easily and these little bits of information are very much part of me. The information is so familiar and yet learned so long ago that I don't know where it comes from or even that it is there.

When my good friend gave me my present he immediately demanded to know what kind of plant it was, and I don't think he really expected me to identify it offhand. However, the moment I saw it I knew the bonsai was a Juniper of some kind and that it was about 5 years old. I knew its acerbic, piney scent from childhood, because we used to have a lot of them growing around our house and during the winter we'd accidentally sled into them and crush the branches. In the summer their prickly needles would scrape our bare feet when my brother and I chased each other around. I knew that maturity would load a Juniper with blueberry-blue berries and that Junipers hardy enough to withstand sub-zero temperatures and harsh soil conditions. For a moment I was flooded with Juniper knowledge and pleased that my guess at the age was so close. The plant was six years old.

Moments of recognition like this are always special to me, even when they are about small things like identifying houseplants on command. It takes a lot of dedication to acquire knowledge and it disappears into the brainvoid far too easily. It is nice to know that it doesn't all disappear completely. Even more meaningful is the reminder that the things to which I dedicated myself so deeply as a child were not foolish or frivolous, even if esoteric. The near-obsessive thirst to decide on the perfect plant to grow, to identify the delicate spring ephemeral, to touch the rough needles and the velvety leaves and the coarse stems on a thousand and one plants was an obsession that constitutes the depth of my knowledge. It is something that has remained with me, though it gets buried three deep under my other activities and everyday living. After hearing the name Sequoia sempervirens in the movie 'Kinsey' last night, I was compelled to look up the meaning of 'sempervirens' in my book of gardener's Latin. Another reminder of the time in my life when the meaning of a plant's name was larger than day-to-day existence.

Those times came and went and returned only recently. The internal travesties I endured adjusting to culture shock after I entered college numbed my ability to absorb and identify information about the botanical things I love to understand. Even though I participated extensively in research activities and got decent to good grades (apart from physics) I often feel that the information I carry from my bachelor's degree was mechanically assimilated and remains divorced from the rest of my psyche. Classroom knowledge continually fails me as I struggle to solve problems and piece the intellectual facts together with the practical aspects of centrifuging and pipetting chemicals in my lab work. Today, identifying a little, artfully twisted tree pulled me back to a time when I learned what I loved and seamlessly applied what I learned to the world around me.

I have taken this recognition as a quiet mandate to keep striking out on my own in the intellectual world. Devoting myself to understanding Michael Polanyi's vision of science (which is lately consuming all my spare time) is not an idle pursuit. It shares the same character of internal striving for knowledge as those endless days of my adolescence, when I stayed up late into the night reading (yes, reading) gardening catalogs and drawing diagrams of personal qualities like courage and honesty that I wanted to acquire. People might wonder how I can spend all my day time on an esoteric subject like plant biology and then go home and bury myself in an old, forgotten philosophy book. But I am convinced that through my persistent study, I will someday be able to justify my work and my life with the same conviction that Polanyi conveys in his book. That day will be a quiet victory.