We are all like cells within the body of the Universe/ God—as are plants, animals, air, natural resources and everything down to a subatomic level. Like cells in a body, these expressions grow, create, divide, destroy, die and are reabsorbed into the Universe/God to create again.
If in poetry court she was calledto testify on matters whereI was condemned to imprisonment: parking my egoat a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,dealing stanzaics to children, shootingoff my mouth, getting cute, for even thislatest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,she would admit from the pitof her unsung brilliance,from all of the paintings and poemsshe herself has been makingand storing in the vast empire of her singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guiltyof plagiarizing my cells.
We are but cells living in a much larger organism, however, this does not make our existence less significant – for an organism without cells is no organism at all. We define it; we make it what it is. We are responsible for its health, its functionality, and above all, its purpose. A lone cell can restore the others, or a lone cell can spread a plague.
The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.
Exercise has a direct brain connection, when you consider what it actually does. What we tend to overlook are the feedback loops that connect the brain to every cell in the body. Therefore when you throw a ball, run on a treadmill, or jog along the shore, billions of cells are "seeing" the outside world. The chemicals transmitted form the brain are acting the way sense organs do, making contact with the outside world and offering stimulation from that world.This is why the jump from being sedentary to doing a minimal amount of exercise - such as walking, light gardening, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator - is so healthy. Your cells want to be part of the world.
The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.
The principal result of my investigation is that a uniform developmental principle controls the individual elementary units of all organisms, analogous to the finding that crystals are formed by the same laws in spite of the diversity of their forms.
Were it not for the melanin in our skin, myoglobin in our muscles and haemoglobin in our blood, we would be the colour of mitochondria. And, if this were so, we would change colour when we exercised or ran out of breath, so that you could tell how energized someone was from his or her colour.