3 Colors, 3 Events, 1 Book

"Living entities are generators of meaning... It is not sentimental but simply following the same logic to say that, for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love."

I wanna talk about three colors that I’m obsessed with right now.

But first, I have a few events coming up locally.

April 20th! Magali, who is the perfect union of French and Oakland, has created an ecofutures fair for Oakland called TOWN LIFE. There’s all kinds of stuff going on at O2AA, the very cool artist space in West Oakland. And as part of it, I put together a panel of fascinating people on seeds and history, human inheritance and plant lineage. It’s like an Oakland Garden Club newsletter, but in person, and right by Kula Nursery. Reserve your (free!) spot here.

May 8th! This one is a KQED Live event, and we’re gonna step back with some botanical garden experts and ask questions that most people think they know the answers to: What is a flower? How did humans come to create something like corn from its ancestor teosinte? What does it mean for a plant to be “native”? We’re going to learn about these green things we love and we’ll learn from them, too. As Herman Hesse wrote long ago, “Those who have learned to listen to trees no longer want to be a tree. They do not yearn to be anything but what they are.” Get your tickets!

May 18th! If you have some spare money lying around AND you wish to use it to support the Gardens of Golden Gate Park including the Japanese Tea Garden, the Botanical Garden, and the Conservatory of Flowers… Come to this Gala! I am emceeing.

Back to colors

GREEN! Have you noticed!? Everything is green, shooting out of green, on top of green, bursting out of green. New-growth green is perhaps the single most pleasing sight for my brain, and right now, there is so much of it. Vast carpets of reflective, electric green. I know I’m supposed to hate grass. I know wildflower blooms are gorgeous. BUT the sheer generosity of the green on these east bay hills right now! BUT:

I’ve run the past two weekends out at Briones, the huge regional park out there by Orinda. It’s not a nature park, you know? There are cows. Some overlooks have you staring out at the industrial exurbs. But it is beautiful. You run up humid little valleys to windy ridges with long rolling hills. Diablo looms (my god, my only god). And when Oakland is foggy in the summer, Briones is often realsummer-hot. Get out there and bathe yourself in this profusion.

Next color

The orange of California poppies is impossible to render. It is so rich, so vibrant. It seems to break my phone’s camera.

My cousin, Jon Bobbie, tells me that certain oranges are impossible to render on a screen. Just check out this chart. So much space over there in the orange quadrant of the color wheel.

And yet, you can pop outside nearly anywhere in the Bay Area right now and find some street urchin of a poppy, hanging on to a clump of dirt in the crevice of a street median, and it will be generating petals so richly orange, they break your technologies of representation. (You know what else does that? The moon, natural enemy of the iPhone, patron saint of the unphotographable.)

Among flower oranges, marigolds—as a whole—are as good. But the broad, even expanse of each poppy petal’s orange, and how it catches the light and wind, might make them, petal-for-petal, the champion of the color. (I know. Why not both? So, yes: both. Co-champions of orange.)

Last Color

The color of the sky on a spring morning after a rain. That blue.

There’s only one blue that’s better, in my personal workbook of good things. And that is the early flowers of a healthy ceanothus, aka California lilac (tho I don’t know anyone who calls them that). The blue of the ceanothus shares the purity of the skyblue, the richness of the poppy, and the electricity of the green grass. So I was delighted to find this little cluster of flowers and new growth thrust out into the sky. What a perfect representation of spring.

That Book

I am still working my way through it, but Philip Ball’s How Life Works is spectacular. He covers a lot of the themes that I’ve been obsessed with in biology. To put too fine a point on it: molecular biology (while awesome) has obscured the complexity of cells, genetic regulatory networks, organismal agency, and much else. If you’re interested in a story of life that doesn’t pretend genes are a deterministic code for how everything functions… this book is for you. It’s also, I will warn you, dense! Get ready for a lot of talk about micro RNA and organelles.

There’s little to no mysticism in these pages. And yet, this point feels like it points to a wholly different value system than the one currently dominant in this world:

Living entities are generators of meaning. They mine their environment (including their own bodies) for things that have meaning for them: moisture, nutrients, warmth. It is not sentimental but simply following the same logic to say that, for we human organisms, another of those meaningful things is love.