sunflowes

sunflower seeds, you are planted, beside your already-thriving cousins, the volunteers. magnolia vine, thank you for flowering after all these years, a deep need for the sexuality of pollinators finally coming to the surface now that the squash vine is gone for good. my own life is a balance like yours, between the comfort of somatic cell growth and the fight with senescence, and mammalian parental care, and defending a nest site from the elements, and foraging. it is deep in the mammalian genetic programming to follow the younglings like slaves, our seed do not disperse in fruit or allow themselves to be carried away by mice and ants so easily.

it crashes and crashes and crashes against the shore of my mind, all that conflict and woe, hope and helplessess i create by arranging this game every six months. i offer food pellets for remembering the significance of an experiment, a genus and species, a genotype. too few food pellets and my gamesters starve, food enough and they go on to other games with other pellets, but mostly they keep inventories of their various pellets as if their lives depended upon it. it is my fault, i suppose, for having failed to find a way to impress upon them the grandeur of a Cambrian lobopod or the tangled connection of ancient ancestors within their brains. at least, this applies to most of them. there are always a few that trickle through, like incandescent dinoflagellates in a current of ideas older and greater than us all. where these will end up, i have no idea, but they are part of a process that assembles and reassembles elements of what really matters in us, through the centuries, like our genes through the millions of years since cambrian lobopods