I’m a big reader and now with things really slowed down, I’ve been reading like crazy again.  Books are great.  You escape your current situation into the atmosphere of the book.

I started reading a great little book by an author I really like named Bill Bryson.  Bryson is this jovial looking American-British author of tomes on growing up in Iowa, living in England and how weird that can be and this delightful look book called A Walk in The Woods about trying to walk the Appalachian trail.  Recently, he came out with a book about the human body.  Now my parents have been in the biomedical sciences for a long time but I’ve never really been interested in human biology.  All those spleens and mile long intestines.  Um, yeah, no thanks.  But Bryson’s book is humorous and I’m learning a lot from it.  That’s what I always liked about his books.  He’s learning about it as he goes and he’s telling you about it in a humorous sort of a way.

What I’ve learned so far is how many filtering mechanisms they are in the body and how everything gets moved around.  Hormones regulate everything around the body.  Bones are stronger than reinforced concrete.  And your liver.  Yeah.  Best not to damage that.  If your liver goes, you’ve got about an hour left of your life.  The lungs bringing you oxygen and removing carbon dioxide from your blood.  Every chapter is kind of a revelation, like the body, this machine that keeps us going.

A couple of days ago, I went on a very pleasant walk around the Arnold Arboretum and I noticed something.  The trees, they kind of look like organs, like lungs almost, doing the breathing for the earth.  Every tree just looked like a lung cut in half.  Plants and trees are the organs of the earth.  When you think of it that way, it makes it yet more shameful how we treat our great planet.

Anyway, here are some pictures of some lung trees: