When I think about membranes, I think about permeability, movement from one place to another. Add sunshine with water to speed along carbon dioxide capture with a big sigh of oxygen at its end. The whizzing around of photons that often jump start the initial works. Add stroma, a liquid that moisturizes the chloroplast, bathing its beauty functions every day and evening, a quiet witness to carbon fixation, fixated on the process.
I visualize a chloroplast with its stack of thylakoids like plates sitting in a kitchen cabinet. And composed, in part, by a long phytol chain that’s also found in cannabis and in green tea. Which is only to say that the world is made of relationships. The chloroplast shuffles enzymes and proteins back and forth in a dance of photosynthesis that’s engineered by DNA instructions. Everything plays out on the card table of life. Do you have a pair? A full house? The chloroplast knits together catabolic reactions to break down molecules and release energy. Much easier said than done.
When I think about membranes, I remember the time when my intestines perforated the mucosa of my stomach wall, sending me to the hospital with a case of peritonitis that almost, save for a doctor’s scalpel, transformed into sepsis. I wonder if a plant relentlessly goes about its tasks apart from any emergencies—drought, global warming, an animal that has destroyed its main branch, a micro camera at the center of a nucleus seeing how it directs a plant to adapt, calls out for help like our world is needing to do, and to what nucleus?