Deep-Sea Denizens at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Evoke Awe and Wonder

The bloody-belly comb jelly is a wonder of a fish, a flower-like creature that appears to be executing a choreographed dance in a diaphanous dreamscape. 

The reality couldn’t be more different. This heart-breaking beauty lives in frigid waters as deep as 9,800 feet (almost 2 miles) below the surface of the North Pacific Ocean where oxygen is low and acidity high, with a crushing pressure of 4,500 pounds per square inch (psi). (For comparison, pressure at sea level is about 15 psi.)

So how was I able to see this imagination-defying denizen of the deep sea? At the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Santa Cruz County, about 70 miles south of San Jose, that’s how. Thanks to the more than 5 years of painstaking effort and wizardry by scientists at the Aquarium and its Research Institute affiliate in recreating their complex habitats, wonders like the bloody-belly comb-jelly, porcupine crab, predatory tunicate, abyssal comb jelly and droopy sea pen that roam the deep dark are there for us to marvel at. Scientists have even found what they think is a new species of flapjack octopus that awaits a scientific name. “Into the Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean” is the only exhibition in the world to offer this opportunity of a lifetime.

Seeing these sublime bioluminescent creatures filled me with a sense of the inexorable drive of life and the relentless flow of time. As the comb-jelly and its cousins ascended and descended in their respective aquariums, responding to the ancient rhythms of the sea innate in their essences, I felt in a visceral way the convergence of the streams of life and time. I remembered the stirring questions pioneering ecologist and marine biologist Rachel Carson asked in her lyrical book, The Edge of the Sea. Writing about the shell of a type of clam called Angel Wing that glows with a strange green light, Carson asked: “Why? For whose eyes? For what reason?”

No matter how much we study and observe creatures of the deep sea, answers to such questions will forever elude us.

The world is a mess now. On any given day it appears to be on the verge of collapsing. Covid, climate emergencies, including degradation of marine habitats, the exponentially rising cost of living, global food shortage, a genocidal war and an epidemic of gun violence have intensified our collective despair. Under such conditions, is there any room for beauty, mystery and wonder in our lives?

It is a valid question. Einstein provided an answer. “The most beautiful thing we can experience,” he wrote, “is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Another answer came from Thoreau: “We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little?”

So yes, we need to set aside moments for beauty, mystery and awe to remain human during turbulent times, especially during turbulent times. The good news is that we don’t have to travel far and wide to experience the mysterious. It is available when we employ ourselves a little, as when we take the time to observe a bluebird family raising its brood in the cavity of a tree, or a family of ducklings taking to the water with much quacking, or an egret patiently waiting for a meal at the edge of a pond, or observing the “morning star” Venus glowing with blinding brightness in the pre-dawn sky.

Or, if we are lucky, to observe the miraculous deep-sea denizens in a unique aquarium.

Trees and Birds are Antidotes to the Pandemic

Yes: No doubt confinement can lead to a renewal in our relationship with nature. Covid-19 has brought the world to its knee, true, but bright people are working night and day to unlock the killer’s secret, to strip it of its corona, to defang and defeat it.

In the meantime, what do we do? Social distancing is the norm but we can go out to bask in the spring sunshine alone or in pairs, walk the edge of wilderness to, as Thoreau put it, revive ourselves with “the tonic of wildness … at the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

Suddenly we are rediscovering our primal origin simply by putting one foot in front of the other and … walking. And seeing. And observing. And wondering how we could have overlooked the wonders just beyond our doorsteps!

Well, there’s an obvious answer: For far too long we have been living by keeping our nose on the grindstone, day in and day out. Even the change of seasons did not register on our senses. Work, work, work, money, money, money. Muddle through life with blinders on.

The coronavirus pandemic has enforced isolation but it has also taken down the barrier we erected between ourselves and nature. Whether absorbing sunlight in car-free roads and pathways or simply sitting and letting nature’s pageantry pass by in slow time, we are discovering that, as Shakespeare put it, “One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin."

With the shelter-in-place, I go out walking twice daily. There are plenty of quiet trails, empty roads and acres of rolling greens near where I live. Golfers used to dominate this pastoral slice of the earth, but their swings have fallen silent and now walkers have taken over.

Lyrical Oak - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

For the first time in years, I find myself soaking in plentiful sunshine filtered by oaks, maples, willows and eucalyptuses. I lie in their seductive shadows, looking up at the clouds moving ever so slowly and the lyrical limbs of the trees creating a forest of myth and songs. By and by I become aware of the grass I am lying on and the earth beneath it. I feel my veins and nerves growing into the ground and communicating with the roots beneath me. I am woven into the roots and the leaves. I am one with the universe.

Eventually I get up and enter the realm of birds.

Robin in action - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

A robin – rotund, well-fed - lands in front of me. It begins pecking at the earth with purpose and lo and behold! a worm is wriggling in its bill. One gulp and the worm is history! I observe it from a respectful distance. Soon I realize that it has not wasted a single peck at the earth: Every time it probes, it brings out a worm. It’s as if it knows exactly where the insect is crawling underneath the ground, invisible to the human eye. How does the robin know its location with such precision, correct 100% of the time!

Apparently, as I learned later from the Internet, it is mostly through its exceptional vision. A robin can see small changes in soil and grass as worms move just below the surface and locate it with pin-point precision. It also relies on its acute hearing. As worms move about, they disrupt the soil, causing small particles of dirt to rub together. While it is too faint for humans to hear, it is audible to migratory songbirds like robins. I kept thinking: If we could somehow harness the collective intelligence of the robins, we could banish or destroy this deadly coronavirus for good.

Phoebe - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

What symbol of freedom birds are! There are the phoebes snapping insects right out of the air. Sparrows and finches flit about with no cars and humans to disrupt their carefree flights. I catch a finch feeding its baby. An oak titmouse tilts its head, surrounded by dense clusters of pink trumpet flowers.

Finches feeding - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Oak Titmouse - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Suddenly my eye is drawn to a splash of bright red pecking away at the bark of a pine: an acorn woodpecker! It angles its bill precariously to probe a cavity in the pine, no doubt devouring whatever is crawling inside. It then rights itself and starts climbing up the tree in short bursts, circling around the trunk with a balance and an agility beyond world-class gymnasts. And then suddenly it’s a blur as it flies away.

Acorn woodpecker - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

And what about the pied-billed grebe coolly appraising the strange humans at the edge of the pond gawking at it? Or the ducklings getting their first swimming lessons (alright, maybe the fourth or the fifth) from their parents?

Pied-billed Greb - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Ducklings get swimming lessons - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

For the Anna’s hummingbird nesting in the trees around my house, I only have to open my front door and there it is, sipping nectar from the pink flowers in the hedge directly across. Occasionally I see a pair and hear their high-pitched calls. These tiny fearless restless bundles of energy with metabolism that can put any human to shame are heavy drinkers, so I make sure my feeder is always brimming with nectar.

Anna's Hummingbird - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Northern flicker - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

On another day during my morning walk a bird alights in front of me literally out of the blue. I cannot believe the exotic nature of this bird, speckled with black dots on a pinkish body, with a dark, almost heart-shaped image on its chest, or is it a map of the United States, as if a graphics designer had imprinted it there. Before I could savor its beauty to my heart’s content, it flew away, but I was grateful for those few moments of wonder. I looked it up and learned that I had seen a northern flicker.

Thereafter, I began to see Northern flickers more and more. It’s like those words we sometimes look up in the dictionary and then we begin to see the words more frequently in everything we read. Flickers have long, sharp bills that allow them to dig deep into the earth for their meals.

Goslings - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

Another day, I saw the last rays of the sun lighting up the fur finery of goslings, watched over by their serene mother. The goslings were gallantly trying to walk, stumbling, falling, regaining balance and moving on. We use the word ‘cute’ far too often and have diminished its meaning but if the word were to describe just one type of living being on earth, it has to be goslings.

Bluebird - (c) by Hasan Z Rahim

But the bird that takes my breath away is the blue bird, part sky, part sunrise and sunset, and all beauty. The blue of the male is so pure it glistens. The females are not as showy, while fledglings are grayish with spots on them. Two pairs of bluebirds that nest in maples, oaks and beech are just a few yards from my doorstep. Sometimes I see a bluebird on a pink trumpet tree, the flowers in gorgeous contrast to its blue. Sometimes I see one with a worm dangling from its bill. These birds are alone worth losing oneself in the outdoors, particularly during this enforced isolation.

Bluebirds - (c) Hasan Z Rahim

“All of humanity’s problems,” wrote Pascal, “stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Well, I have a perfect excuse for feeling restless sitting in a room. At a certain hour of the day, when the sun hasn’t crossed the meridian yet and a light breeze is blowing, the bluebird beauties beckon, and I no longer sit quietly in a room alone.

Time Freezes in ‎Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day

(“Groundhog Day,” starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, was released a quarter-century ago today. On this Friday, the 2^nd of February, 2018, the only celebrity groundhog of the universe, Punxsutawney Phil, has seen his shadow, predicting another six weeks of winter. But what accounts for the timeless appeal of the movie, for its enduring charm? I think the reason is clear: Time. The movie explores the mystery of time subtly yet forcefully, mixing humor with depth that forces the viewer – through the experience of the arrogant and narcissistic weatherman Phil Connors who is trapped in a time warp and finds himself living in the same Groundhog Day over and over again - to confront mortality, life, love, loss, priority, memory, leading ultimately to redemption and enlightenment. The sign of a timeless movie is not just that newer viewers also become fans but that repeat viewers find something new every time they see it again.)

What if there isn’t a tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!

Think of the myriad ways by which we describe time: time flies, time crawls, time stands still, time loops, time is finite, time is infinite, time is money, time dilates, the arrow of time, cyclical time, circular time, linear time, non-linear time, geological time, atomic time, fullness of time, texture of time, fleeting time, recursive time, in the nick of time, the gift of time, the labyrinth of time, and particularly in Silicon Valley, billable time.

Probably no metaphor is used more extensively to describe an entity in literature and science than time. Listen to the echo of time in “To Be Or Not To Be.” Proust spent decades “In Search of Lost Time.” For Muhammad Ali, “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” To Thoreau, “Time is but the stream I go
a-fishing in.” From Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney:  So the little moments,/Humble though they be,/Make the mighty ages/Of Eternity. Rabindranath Tagore: "Floating on the sea of time, yet cannot grasp a drop of it!"

Physicist Richard Feynman: “A positron is an electron going backwards in time.” How about ‘forever and ever’ time? Physicists who won the 2017 physics Nobel Prize (Thorne, Weiss, Barish) were cited for “detecting gravity waves, predicted by Albert Einstein a hundred years ago, that came from a collision between two black holes. It took 1.3 billion years for the waves to arrive at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detector in the United States. The LIGO registered the wave as a tone nicknamed the ‘cosmic chirp.’”

And if entanglement in space from quantum mechanics is not strange enough, how about entanglement in time?

So what do you want out of life?

The best way to honor the gift of life is to honor the gift of time …

The night sky is dense with stars. A new one seems to bloom every few minutes, making the dark domed garden even more inviting. But it is not the stars that hold me in their spell.

It is the trees.

I am in Chittagong, in the city of my birth by the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, almost eight thousand miles away from my ‘naturalized’ home in San Jose, California.

The mango and the betel nut saplings that my father had planted a half-century ago are now taller than the three-story building of my adolescent years. Rustling and dreamlike, they speak to me in a voice so real and with such urgency that I have to grip the railing from trembling.

“What have you done with your time?” they ask. “You saw us in our infancy Now the stars are within our reach. What have you done with the years gone by?”

I scan my life for an answer, memory guiding me down a path of light and shadow. Experienced life’s inevitable ebb and flow. Father passed away a decade ago after fighting diabetes for years. Children grow up, move out. Mother confined to a wheelchair as time takes its relentless toll on this irrepressible woman.

Wife and I continue working, retirement not in sight for economic reasons, even though we are advanced in years.

But ‘summing up’ isn’t what these animated trees are interested in. They want to know if I have used my time well. They are not interested in fame or wealth, neither of which I have, but whether I have honored time, given it the respect it deserved. They want to know if I was able to coax from it the ability to connect the dots that lay scattered about me, each a milestone of sorts in search of an elusive meaning.

So I really don’t know if I have used my time well in six decades. The truth and the tragedy are that I probably never will!

Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?
I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.

Do you know what today is?
No, what?
Today is tomorrow. It happened.

What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same,
 and nothing that you did mattered?

That about sums it up for me.

Do you ever have déjà vu?

Didn't you just ask me that?

Although it is winter, the night is mild and redolent of Bay of Bengal a few miles away. A preternatural silence has enveloped the bustling port city and the occasional tinkle of a rickshaw at the edge of my consciousness only deepens this silence. I find myself caught in a time warp that seems to extend beyond the Milky Way. My wife is asleep in the room where she slept as a bride over three decades ago, unaware of the ghosts of yesteryears crowding me. A breeze rustles the mango leaves and sways the betel nut trees and I hear their insistent question: “What have you done with the gift of time?”

At last I give up. “I don’t know,” I whisper.

Sometimes, people just die.

Not today.

How about you? What do you want?

What I really want is someone like you.

I think you're the kindest, sweetest, prettiest person I've ever met in my life. I've never seen anyone that's nicer to people than you are. The first time I saw you... something happened to me. I never told you but... I knew that I wanted to hold you as hard as I could. I don't deserve someone like you. But if I ever could, I swear I would love you for the rest of my life.

It's beautiful. I don't know what to say.

I do. Whatever happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I'm happy now... because I love you.

It's so beautiful!... Let's live here.

We'll rent, to start.

Phil Connors gets caught in a time warp and finds himself slowly turning mad. He embraces death but the warp keeps delivering him to life’s shore. Slowly the scales of solipsism and arrogance fall from his eyes and by the time he comes free of the “same old, same old,” he has found the meaning and purpose of his life.

If only the rest of us are as lucky!

Thoughts on Seeing "Three Monkeys"

“Play to your strength” is a golden rule to live by but difficult to embrace. There are many reasons for it. Your parents expect you to be an engineer, and even though your heart is into photography, you spend the most creative years of your life toiling away for an engineering degree. You sense that writing is your calling but everyone tells you that there’s no money there and so you grit your teeth and enroll in medical school. And, of course, how can you go wrong with computer science, the recognized gateway to wealth, and so you follow the herd, even though creating music is your passion.

Doing what others expect you to do instead of following your own heart leads to an unfulfilled life, whether or not you are making lots of money. And there are too many of us who fall into that category! It is what I think Thoreau meant when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

These thoughts came to me as I watched the Hindi movie “Three Idiots.” (I will use “musketeers” in place of “idiots,” because that’s what the three protagonists really are.)

Farhan, Raju and Rancho (Aamir Khan) are three engineering students at one of India’s elite engineering colleges. Rancho is a savant and a visionary.

He is appalled by the rote learning the college promotes and shocked by the autocratic and inflexible attitude of the principal. His challenging questions unsettle the teachers whose only aim is to prepare students to pass exams and land jobs with engineering firms. That they will be no more than cogs in the wheels does not concern anyone. When mediocrity works, why not maintain the status quo?

Rancho rejects this factory approach to learning. He seeks real knowledge, not pseudo-knowledge. He tells the other two musketeers not to chase success but to “make success chase you.” “Don’t beg at the feet of luck,” he admonishes them. Again and again he reminds them not to be afraid of the future. Do what interests you. That way, your job will be like play and you will be happy and professionally fulfilled.

In the nick of time, Rancho manages to save a girl about to be married off to a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Of course, the girl turns out to be … who else but the principal’s daughter! The typical Hindi melodrama notwithstanding, the movie does not veer away from its focus, which is to show a) how schools can become prisons and stifle the creativity of anyone who submits to rote knowledge, and b) how to break free from the walls of ignorance and appearance we build around ourselves by playing to our strength, no matter how daunting the obstacles may be.

Rancho is thrown out of classes by teachers because he is disobedient, his questions threaten the hierarchy, and his answers do not mimic the formal and dense textbooks. So he wanders to other classes to soak up whatever knowledge he can.

Watching this reminded me of something Steve Jobs, the Apple chairman and CEO, said in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. Jobs attended an expensive community college but “after six months, I couldn't see the value in it … So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting … Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating … None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

What Jobs is saying is that if you trust your guts, sooner or later you will find what animates you, and then you will find your life’s calling. But you have to take that risk, “trust that it would all work out OK.”

Jobs went on to say that “Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I also remembered a story about the late great physicist Richard Feynman who had the following advice for a younger physicist:

“Go look at an electron microscope photograph of an atom. Don’t just glance at it. It is very important that you examine it very closely. Think about what it means.”
“Okay.”
“And then answer this question. Does it make your heart flutter?”
“Does it make my heart flutter?”
“Yes or no. It’s a yes or no question. No equations allowed.”
“All right, I’ll let you know.”
“Don’t be dense. I don’t need to know. You need to know. This exam is self-graded. And it’s not the answer that counts. It’s what you do with the information.”

This is what Rancho is saying too: Find something that makes your heart flutter and then do something about it. If you do, the sky is the limit.

“Three Idiots” transcends the inevitable song-and-dance routines of the typical Hindi movie (which it has in plenty) and teaches something powerful in an entertaining way. If you nurture the sweet dream of self-employment or if you need a nudge to do what your heart tells you to do, you may find this movie inspiring. And remember, it is never too late to do what you always wanted to do.

A Touch of the Wild

There is a section of a scenic highway on my way to work that enlivens my otherwise bland commute. Especially in spring, the sights fill the senses. It rained last night and this morning the sky looks as if it has been scrubbed clean to let its pure blue shine through. Hills and valleys lie in repose and eagles soar above the oaks and the willows. Here and there yellow mustard and orange poppies make the green meadows appear even greener.

Between two roads named Deer Creek and Coyote Hill, I catch a glimpse of white and chestnut horses basking in the fullness of spring sunshine. What compels my attention, though, is a colt that seems to be dancing rather than running, and a woman pursuing it with glee, coaxing it to eat oats out of a bucket she is holding. The two are engaged in a tango, and the sense of playfulness between animal and human is palpable.

A few minutes later I am at my desk, turning on computers and preparing to spend yet one more day of my life working with “productivity tools,” email and the Web. It is when I am about to save my work an hour later, in the service of a Silicon Valley company that pays my bills, that it hits me: what I am doing chained to my desk indoors when life is expressing itself with such force and zest outdoors? I cannot shake off the image of the frisky colt. A sadness slowly seeps into my day.

It is almost impossible now to imagine a day without the Web. That's understandable, given how deeply it has become woven into our lives. But what is tragic is how easily we have learned to pass our days without a single contact with nature. True, these are desperate times. People are losing their livelihood and their homes. Soup kitchens cannot keep up with demand. A cruel recession has already taken on the signs of a depression. Who has time for nature?

But that's precisely what we must make time for as we turn inward for solace and give up things we had no use for in the first place. A less cluttered life looks more and more appealing. Thoreau's call for simplicity resonates. We are rich, to paraphrase the Bard of Walden, in proportion to the number of things we can afford to let alone. To put this into practice, we ought to renew our relationship with nature, to go for a walk in the woods, to take to the trails, to look with fresh eyes at the trees and the birds where we live, to grow something in the backyard or on the window sills. I know I will because I can think of no better way to clear my perspective and cleanse my soul.