Snap, Crackle, Pop...My Tendon

      Things are breaking down, my microwave for one.  Granted, it's a 1996 Sharp model that had been repaired a few times before this (not that much to a microwave other than the magnetron, said our repair guy).  But this time the transformer gave up the ghost and made a stink.  Really.  If you've never experienced that burnt electrical wiring smell, it's one that you don't readily forget (the possibly of fire inside your walls), a smell that lingers for days and days.  We were lucky to have seen the smoke coming through the microwave's vent and quickly shutting off the power; but then came me trying to remember how to take the dang microwave off of the bracket between our cabinets (it seemed that we had last replaced the magnetron in 2017 so it had been awhile) all in order to heave it down to our repairman's shop (same guy in a tiny shed who first advised me NOT try to replace a magnetron by myself because of the electrical charge the capacitor can retain, even when disconnected...as if I would ever attempt such a thing). Two days later, it was fixed and back on our wall (and still smelling of burnt something).  So if you've gotten this far and are wondering if you should keep reading because I'm just blah-blah-blahing away as if I were a distant cousin to Jonathan Franzen,* I will quickly add that our microwave was built into our kitchen cabinets way back when and that toady's newer models are bigger, smaller, wider, thinner, or a host of other measurements that don't match the opening.  But none of this post is about my broken microwave oven because what also broke was my tendon.  It had snapped.

Graph: Foot Education

     Anterior tibialis it was, the one that pretty much "lifts" your foot when you walk, or as the National Institute of Health put it: The tibialis anterior tendon (TAT) begins at the distal one-third of the tibia.  It travels across the anterior ankle and dorsum of the foot to insert vertically on the medial cuneiform and the base of the first metatarsal.  It is the most medial tendon of the ankle and foot.  Mine is basically balled up around my ankle (think of a lump at the top of my ankle, as if I'd been bitten by a snake).  Ah well, the joys of growing older (many foot orthopedic sites list this injury as somewhat common in my age group).  An aging human microwave in need of repair.  Luckily I can still walk without pain (one surgeon told me that the nerves had likely snapped when the tendon did) and my surrounding tendons and muscles were compensating for the time being (they would eventually fatigue and possibly affect my gait, the docs told me).  My dog didn't care about any of that...just keep taking me out, he told me.  And I do.

     Truth be told this isn't about my tendon or my foot, but more about how connected we are.  I couldn't help but reflect back on the last post and think of how Deepak Chopra implied that everything was connected, down to our cells and atoms...my tendon had snapped but other parts of my body were there to compensate, even if temporarily.  In her book Finding the Mother Tree, author Suzanne Simard** wrote in her introduction: Nothing lives on our planet without death and decay.  From this springs new life, and from this birth will come new death...it became uncanny, almost eerie, the way my work unfolded in lockstep with my personal life, entwined as intimately as the parts of the ecosystem I was studying...I conducted hundreds of experiments, with one discovery leading to the next, and through this quest I uncovered the lessons of tree-to-tree communication, of the relationships that create a forest society...One of the first clues came while i was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network.  When I followed the clandestine path of conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive though the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links.  A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings.  Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes...they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape...There's grace to complexity, in actions cohering, in what we do alone , but also in what we enact together.  Our own roots and systems interface and tangle, grow into and away from one another and back again in a million subtle moments.  If that sounds a bit absurd, Simard's lifetime of research may convince you otherwise, or make you wonder why you would question such findings.  Do we really feel that we are truly acting "alone" and that we can make it in life without help, even if we don't ask for it.  A simple cut on our finger shows that so many systems of our bodies just "work" whether we will them to or not.

Graphic: British Antarctic Survey

     But here's something else that broke...a chunk of ice the size of greater London (or about the size of TWO New York cities, as Smithsonian noted).  It was the second such ice shelf to break away in as many years.  Said part of the piece: While a 600-square mile ice chunk weighing about 500 billion tons may seem enormous, “it is far from being the largest iceberg ever seen, which rivaled Long Island [about 1,400 square miles],” Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, tells the Washington Post’s Dan Stillman.  Perhaps a bit more intriguing in the same magazine was an excerpt from Sinkable about the Titanic and how it hit the ocean floor at 30 miles per hour, an ocean floor that was two and a half miles away from the surface.  As the article put it, the iceberg --once larger than the Colosseum and the pyramids together-- was on its last legs having floated and shrunken in size after three years of melting: 

After three years adrift, the icy mass likely had one week to live, two at most...Any other week and a ship nobody believed could sink would complete its maiden voyage and turn around for its ho‐hum second one.  Any other day and the iceberg would’ve been a fraction of its dangerous size.  Any other hour and it would’ve been hundreds of feet away.  Perhaps even more surprising (at least to me) were the number of people that survived (over 700).  It's been cold here as well (yes, that temp reading is just abovet 1 degree F), as it has been in so many other parts of the world (my city has already used 825 tons of road salt).  But this bit of snowflake history also emerged from the Titanic article: Snow tends to fall in places where other snow has already fallen.  And even though every snowflake is different, they’re not as unique as we’ve been told.  They start as spheres and form tendrils to diffuse heat.  Cold temperatures produce flakes that look like bullets or needles.  Extra‐cold weather is when you find the classic shape of a six‐sided prism, or the fern‐like crystal with six radiating branches.  

     Speaking of radiating branches (such as the much-smaller but additional tendons in my foot), Geography Realm wrote about the many rivers that crisscross under London, some 375 MILES of rivers.  Although most are long-buried or diverted (one river runs directly under Buckingham Palace and was once known for its salmon...it is now used as a sewer), 25 miles of those rivers have been restored in the last ten years and hope is that another 60 miles will be further restored by 2050, wrote a piece in Discover.  And how exactly does one "restore" an underground river?  This one-minute timelapse compiled by the Rochdale Borough of their restoration project will show that it takes quite a bit of time and engineering. But what caught my attention in the same issue was an interview with author Sushma Subramanian about her book on touch and what it means.  Said the publisher's notes: We are out of touch.  Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world.  But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation.  Because of deeply rooted beliefs that favor the cerebral over the corporeal, touch is maligned as dirty or sentimental, in contrast with supposedly more elevated modes of perceiving the world.  Added the author in the interview: ...the sense of touch is defined differently based on the aspects of it that these different fields are studying  -- does it have to do with particular types of receptors in the skin or does it have to do with a wider physical or emotional experience...We understand it culturally, and what we incorporate into it is a lot of things that have to do with our skin, feelings deeper in our body and movements; all of these different elements.  

      My family rarely hugged or touched, likely due to the culture we grew up in.  Picture families in Mexico or Italy and you typically picture families where hugging and touching is second nature; not so in Asian or British cultures.  Andrew O'Hagan wrote a review of Harry's book, Spare, in The London Review of Books, saying in part: ...what father –despite a lifetime of kowtowing to his own reality-strapped, unfeeling parents– would tell his 12-year-old in the middle of the night that his mother was dead, then leave him on his own in the bedroom until morning?  What sort of father would make his boys march behind their mother’s coffin surrounded by people holding up cameras?  Harry might live in a universe of grievances, but none of his family seems able to hug him, to placate him, to come to his side when the press is especially vile, and the combination of these things has been explosive.  The queen stuck to tradition.  She wouldn’t let William wear his army uniform on his wedding day.  When Harry told her, alone by the tailgate of a Range Rover on the Sandringham estate, that he intended to marry Meghan Markle, she dubiously gave her assent, but didn’t embrace him or shake his hand, and I think this gives you the measure of the family (O'Hagan also noted that Harry had never read a book in his life and so never actually "wrote" the book but farmed it out to best-selling author J.R. Moehringer of The Tender Bar fame).

     Our senses are all over the place, even if we sometimes don't realize it or fully utilize them.  The snapping of my primary dorsoflexing tendon made me realize how little control I had over my body but also how much of my body didn't really care what I thought; it just took over and "covered" for me.  In a sense, it made me "see."  Said author Kristy Hamilton in her book Nature's Wild Ideas: The lobster eye is 256 times more powerful at catching beams of light in the dark than a human eye is in daylight...Up close, the eye of a lobster is curved like the dome of an observatory, "but under the microscope a lobster's eye looks like perfect graph paper," Angel told Science magazine (astronomer J. Roger P. Angel who is credited with creating the multi-faceted mirror telescopes that are used worldwide and in most of our deep-space satellites).  That eye is composed of millions of tiny mirrored tubes, or "micro-channels," each measuring about 20 microns across (a micron is one-millionth of a meter, or twenty times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence).  These mirrored tubes collect as much light as possible from all angles.  Light hits the smooth surface of the mirrors and is reflected onto a single point on the retina.  Where humans see by refraction --a process that flips the world for our brains to see-- lobsters see by reflection, no flipping necessary.  The lobster's eye offers an unusual example of right angles in nature.  Look at a forest, a bumblebee, the swirl of an ear, a seed, an octopus -- no right angles.  If we look at humanity's designs --desks, street corners, sheets of paper, floor tiles-- right angles are everywhere.  They're so ubiquuitous we scarely notice them in our windows, rugs, or packaging boxes.  Where humans build with right angles in mind, nature likes her curves.

     Often when I plop down to watch something on my television (rectangular, I should note), I think of our linear mindset --a rocket or a bullet, our mobile phones, our doors and cabinets, our view of time-- all while we stare at our rounded fingernails and socks.  Perhaps we need to look differently at things, if we can.  The animal kingdom is rife with other biological sensors, too, wrote author Hamilton..  There is the electroreception of a platypus, the infrared detection of snakes, the polarized view of octopuses, the fire detection of jewel beetles and the magnetic sensor of bees, to name a few.  Sharks are one of the best biological conductors of electricity, using a network of jelly-filled pores around their face to sense differences in the electrical charge of an animal and the water around them.  Pit vipers detect infrared light with "night-vision goggles" sensitive enough to notice when temperatures vary a thousandth of a degree.  Round-worms use a single nerve to detect Earth's magnetic field...The lobster is a reminder that Earth's creatures are portals into other ways of seeing the world.  One has to wonder what view animals or trees or bacteria have of us...or do they, as with my body, not really care, their own lives simply on auto-pilot?  Perhaps their own form of intelligence has studied us far longer than we have them.  Perhaps these life forms wonder why we humans still don't look into ourselves and find what resides inside, that is if we are willing to do so.  Perhaps the Native American view of life being circular is so difficult to comprehend because for the most part we think linearly.  Author Hamilton quoted poet Diane Ackerman: ...first we need to see ourselves from different angles, in many mirrors, as a very young species, both blessed and cursed by our prowess.  Instead of ignoring or plundering nature, we need to refine our natural place in it.

     Connections are all around us, both in the plant and animal world (as authors Simard and Hamilton pointed out) and in human history (as science editor James Burke did in his entertaining television series many moons ago).  And there are connections we can't yet explain, such as thirst.  Wrote a piece in Scientific American: ...when we gulp a drink, we feel almost instantly satisfied, and yet it takes 10 to 15 minutes for a liquid to make if from our mouth, through the digestive tract and into the bloodstream. “Something in the brain is saying that your blood may not have changed conditions yet but that you drank enough water so you can stop feeling thirsty,” explains neuroscientist Christopher Zimmerman of Princeton University...“You get a signal from the blood that tells your current state of hydration, a signal from the mouth that tells you how much fluid you drank, and a signal from the gut that tells you what was consumed—was it water, was it something else?”  What is that and what happens when such signals or connections grow weaker or completely sever?  Sometimes they heal or compensate (my tendon) and sometimes they becomes unworkable (my microwave).  Friendships, family, aging, life itself...

     The phrase "keep in touch" may have far more meaning than we choose to imagine.  How we see, how we think, how we feel (in this case, literally), how we connect.  Changing our viewpoint may be difficult but a good place to start may be in giving a hug, a truly meaningful hug, one which would touch both you and another; one which would help you connect.  Hug a tree, hug a friend, or hug a loved one...even better, hug yourself.  

*While Franzen is a best-selling author and I most certainly am not, I must say that when reading his works I find his detailed description of almost every scene a bit too detailed, which is why his books are usually around 800 pages.  Yes, the woman hanging her clothes out to dry is captured in all of her polka-dotted rayon blouse life, but only after 22 pages have passed.  Certainly Franzen is not the only author to write such lengthy descriptions but personally I found (and find) him far from captivating...my opinion of course.  And let's face it, I threw this all in at the end just in case you happen to be a huge fan of Franzen.  Personal taste is what makes the world go 'round and is also likely why so few in the Western world have heard of Nancy Ajram, whose videos have over 30 million views.

**Like Franzen, author Simard goes into great detail about the process of doing research only hers is the real world.  Discovering what grows and affects growth takes years and LOTS of controlled studies, far different from planting your garden each spring and seeing the results come summer.  For Simard, acres of forest are plotted out with some tree roots or branches isolated, some left partially thinned, some placed with different soil types, and some simply left alone; other areas are cut or sprayed or mixed in with additional forest growth...and then she has to wait, always checking, always taking copious notes.  What passes is often not one year, but sometimes two or five years before she can check the results.  Peers and other researchers often question her results (usually this is from the logging companies who want profits but not at the cost of change) and more studies need to be completed.  It all sounds both exhausting and fulfilling but Simard mixes in her family life (which is basically how you can monitor how much time has passed) as well as the many brick walls she encounters.  All in all, her memoir is as detailed as her studies and is likely a view of researchers in general (medicines, foods, agriculture, oceans, et. al.)...to find out more about her results and continuing work on how the forests "can save us" as she puts it, visit The Mother Tree Project.  You may be surprised at how connected we all are on this planet, and how grounded...