Leaf
Botanically speaking, the leaf is the part of the plant that is the above-ground organ used expressly for the purpose of photosynthesis which is the conversion of light energy into chemical energy. This, to me, is all rather abstract --- processes of conversion generally are because I am always curious about the exact moment when something stops being "something" and starts being "something else". I can understand the absorption of the light energy just fine, and I can plainly see the end result --- where I get so metaphysically lost is judging the point at which this conversion actually has happened or hasn't happened. Similar to a clock: I can watch the seconds 56, 57, 58 and then 59 tick-tock forward into 0 but I always wonder what about 59.5 seconds, 59.9999 seconds, and so on endlessly --- I can't understand how it happens that 59 becomes 60 and 0 at the same time and in that instant one hour also becomes the next. There must be, in the plant's life as there is in the second's life, a space which it is not fully converted and still tethered to both ends at the same time. To expand the scope into a more general observation/rhetorical question: When does a leaf become leaves? When there are 10 or more, 100 or more, more than just the one leaf, or otherwise?
I guess this is all just the same reiteration on the questions I keep asking myself here: where is the border drawn between single and plural (Or, simply: When does a person become part of a people?) To leave that for a second and simply meditate on the wondrous subject of a leaf...
In the hopes of creating a snappy, concise, and half-witty parallelism, I was trying for the past few moments to think of something to compare a leaf to that was new and somewhat surprising. I'm at a loss, and can only think of relating a leaf to the skin on a human. Both store energy, both protect the body, both absorb light and change it into something else, and yet all these reasons scream out to me: "Pedestrian! Bland!" But still, I circle around it in my head more and more and the thing just keeps resting on the leaf as skin relationship.
The skin of a girl: visible veins bumping just beneath the thin shield of see through sheets which lay atop the surface of her hand's framework, bones as twigs and blood as concrete. But delicate, delicate! Her hand trembles a bit as it picks up a book, and isn't this a bit like a leaf on the branch alone but extended toward the sun, grabbing. Air and airiness. The hand as a leaf itself, but also the skin covering the body as a scattering of leaves. Oh, how each little one shades its neighbor and all with their own little spots and shapes combine to make a wonderfully blended wash of color. And what of the movement of the body, is it not like a tree brushed with a little billow of wind so that all individual leaves stand to sing all at once like a symphony, each dancing on its stem but all moving in the same general motion: arms bend slightly, wrists dangle to knuckles that break into yet more wavering directions --- all dance alone but togetherly in such a way as to show hidden choreography of the earth's invisible premier maître de ballet.
