Seven little lessons to rediscover our everyday life.
Seven days for the Creation... of a new perspective.
The well-known detail: Around April-May, when plants become luxuriant again after winter hibernation, for many people the nightmare starts again: rhinitis, asthma, conjunctivitis. If you don’t know anyone who is allergic to pollens, maybe you are the one: in Italy, about one person out of five suffers from this chronic disease.
The background: Pollens cause the majority of allergies, but it is wrong to assume that these tiny grains are the only little creatures flying in the wind.
In 1910 some German scholars had already discovered some algae that live in the air; in the 1960s Malcolm Brown of the University of Austin, Texas, noticed that some types of clouds contained certain species of algae along with many other microbes.
Actually, a beautiful and seemingly clear sky is not only crossed by flocks of birds: to date, 1,000 species of bacteria (with a concentration of about 500 per m³), 40,000 varieties of fungal spores and hundreds of algae have been detected in the air, along with mosses, protozoans and liverworts.
Not to mention the most minute insects or those spiders that produce a spider’s web and let it swing until a draught lifts them in flight and then drops them off many miles away.
Aerobiologists, who study this biodiversity throbbing in the atmosphere, use the term ‘aeroplankton’ to define these floating organic particles as a whole, by analogy with the floating aquatic organisms carried by sea currents or freshwater pools.
Aeroplankton literally means “wandering in the air”: although unable to fly autonomously, some of these living creatures eat, evacuate and even reproduce in the sky.
The Fifth Lesson: Try and imagine that the sky is like the sea. Trees and plants grow attached to the seabed, mammals and other land creatures crawl and walk over them. We are also there, submerged under thousands of meters of an ethereal substance, where countless tiny creatures frantically move. Above the surface of this enormous ocean that covers everything, nothing is left but the sidereal cold.
This image – which is not so visionary, as we have learned – may not provide a relief against allergy symptoms ... but our small daily problems are going to be less burdensome when looked at from this perspective, bearing in mind that we are part of a strange, absurd, gigantic bubble in which everything is impregnated with life.