Mary
Connections Assignment (A)
One of my favourite things to do is sit outside under a tree. It started when I first locked myself out of my house when I was young. What else could I do? I didn’t have a cell phone, didn’t want to do homework and had a book in my backpack that was calling my name. Hence, I pulled out that book and settled myself under a tree. I still love looking up through the branches of a tree; it makes it so much easier to work. Trees led me to find my first connection between the image and poem we were presented with in this assignment.
Initially, I had a great deal of difficulty finding a connection between the two ‘things’. I ended up searching for the name in the hyperlink of source two using Google and Wikipedia. I eventually discovered that the picture was of two diatoms, microscopic single-cellular organisms that are photosynthetic and make up some kinds of plankton.[1] I went on to research diatoms in a fair amount of detail. I still could not make a connection between this image and the poem. I could see that one of the diatoms had three corners and the poem had three lines, but this did not seem like the kind of connection I was looking for. I could also see that both the poem and the picture would be considered beautiful by different people, but I felt there was a more complicated connection between the objects as well.
Sitting under a tree, I was reminded of grade 12 Biology lesson: the air we breathe is recycled. The same particles are exhaled as carbon dioxide and then transformed back into oxygen by photosynthetic plants. People and many other living things, including cicadas breathe out carbon dioxide. Diatoms are part of the carbon fixation cycle; they take carbon out of such substances as carbon dioxide, recycling it back into the environment. Hence, the organisms talked about, diatoms and cicadas, are actually partners: they need someone to play the opposite role in order to survive.
After I found this initial connection, finding a second one was not very difficult. The summer before grade 12, I went up to Manitoulin Island with my cousins. We spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to swim in the frigid water. I realize now that the water we were swimming in actually supported a wide variety of diatoms. I can connect these diatoms to singing cicadas because the cicadas provided the soundtrack I listened to as I fell asleep each night. Both organisms were a large part of each day I spent on the Island and thus I connect them through my memories.
Everything in this world can be connected if we are willing to search for that connection, including a poem by Basho and an image of diatoms.
[1] "Diatoms: More on Morphology." Introduction to Bacillariophyta (The Diatoms). UCMP. 20 Sept. 2008 <http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/chromista/bacillariophyta.html>.