Wind in the Leaves

Someone has hypothesized that the human brain is so complex and intricate because it has to be to grasp the complex intricacies of nature, the fractal branching of a tree and fern, the buzz of an insect, the melody of a warbler, the infinities at the edge of a cloud.

The brain has to have a billion neurons, each with thousands of connections, because nature has its own billions— leaves, raindrops, ants, feathers, hairs —and its own thousands of connections— twigs, branches, streams, rivers, veins and arteries, food chains, water cycles, webs of life.

Some have supposed Earth, draped in nature, is itself a kind of brain. It's living; why shouldn't it be thinking?

Does a neuron know it is a cog in a conscious being? Or does it sit under the branches of the corpus callosum listening serenely to the electricity whipping through the gray matter above it, marveling in delight at the lacework of dendrites in can never comprehend?

Life and sensation are mystery at every scale. Humans simply have the privilege of occupying the middle, as much bigger than a subatomic quark as we are smaller than the universe.

Perhaps even a galaxy is a kind of brain, listening, very slowly, to a cosmic wind that has whistled since creation, whistled only the beginning of a first note, carried at light speed to the infinite upper rafters of the universe.

All is song, sung in octaves beyond comprehension— light and sun and Earth and wind and life —and the buzzing of a brain that sees and hears and tastes and feels and wants, wants it all to go on as it has, without beginning or end or purpose or place, just the whirl of a divine symphony performed at a billion frequencies.

The leaves in the wind have riches that cannot be stolen.