Fingernails, Tricks, & Kids

Never Surrender Being Awed

“Bouquet” acrylic by Myra Alibrando

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Wide-Eyed Children

Frequently, I have enjoyed amazing little kids with simple magic tricks. They are so easily impressed. I make a coin disappear and remove it from their ear. I remove the end of my thumb (this made one child cry).

Sure, I would stop for 15 minutes and watch the ants on the way home from school as an 8-year (then often step on them). As smaller children we would be amazed that we could not escape our shadow. It frustrated me that I could never remember falling asleep, only going to bed and waking up.

My awe today is on a different level. After decades of taking for granted everything around, I slowly transcended into another realm of asking “What would it take to actually make that?” I have more wide-eyed, childlike awe today than I ever did as a child.

Fingernails

A fingernail is nothing new. They get dirty. They need trimming. But what would my fingers be like without fingernails? It’s hard to imagine. I’ve tried. Would they bend too easy? Scratching an itch would be less satisfying. Fingernails are good for scratching lots of other things like little spots off the table or phone screen or car or clothing.

So how do you grow a fingernail right there at the right spot? How does that work so consistently well all our life? I can tell you the word: biosynthesis, but honestly that is just a word. Blood is “transmutated” at the base of the fingernails to grow evermore fingernails. Now you can add one more marvel about your blood’s many services. But this is only an answer and a new word. My brain wants to know how does that actually work. How does blood become a fingernail? Can we do that? No, of course not.

Blood Converted into Body Parts

In fact, biosynthesis is the same marvel that converts blood into teeth. It uses different conversion tools and only done once, but once again, blood is the source placing what we need to the right spot. Believe me, if anyone figures out how to transmutate blood into teeth at just the right spot is going to have a very profitable patent.

Forget the words and technicalities; just be a kid and wonder how this really works. The fingernails are continuous but the teeth is mostly a one-time process. Why the difference? How do these cells know how to do this? What do the cells look like? How many are there? Are they unemployed after the work is done? Do they live there or commute?

Outrageously Miraculous and Common

I just used biosynthesis as one example, but my brain thinks the same way when looking out the window at a tree. How do those leaves end up all the same size and shape?

The same goes for a speck of a bug that lands on my arm who comes from parents that live somewhere, eat, reproduce, and travel.

The questions raise my awareness of INCREDIBLE, INCOMPREHENSIBLE, “MIRACULOUS” common everyday things.

That includes us being alive and all that is required.

Imagine how you are reading my thoughts via historical English, my laptop, the internet to your gadget, to your eyes, to your brain. I am far away from you and you are reading this AFTER I wrote this, an hour, a day, a month ??

How does one create and design minds like the human mind?

"O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." Psalm 104:24

“Nature Never Stops Talking …” my first published nature book in 2005 because I genuinely experience this non-verbal communication on a regular basis. Nature teaches us about so many characteristics of the Inventor, Engineer, & Manufacturer.

Frankenstein Reproductions

As far as I know, there is not a single living thing (including single cells) that man can literally make. By the way cloning a DaVinci painting does not make one an artist anymore than cloing makes science creators of life).

If the day ever comes when we can actually create a single plant cell that lives and reproduces, it will probably be some kind of Frankenstein that lacks important things and reproduces abnormalities.

We cannot take inventory of the list of all the creatures that exist and the co-dependencies between temperature and instinct, between timing and life, between earth’s orbit and animal behavior, or the importance of a shell around an egg yolk. So if we try and figure out every single cell type represented in all life, it is more than overwhelming. And yet, here it is. It is all here. These things are all working all around us and in our own bodies.

It makes me worship.

"But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you... In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind." Job 12:7-10

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