BioChem: Week 1

One of the opportunities I’ve found in Larry’s classes is the chance to really examine the intersection, or complete divergence, of “Western” thinkers and the foundations of TCM. Bouncing around the various articles available to us from the first day of BioChem, I landed upon Rebecca Rupp’s article, “Water, Air, Fire, Earth: the original Fab Four.” I found this piece to be insightful, entertaining, and a representation of how people within the “Western” paradigm are honoring the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment, an awareness infused in the medicine we study courtesy of Daoism. Rupp concludes,

“But I prefer to think that the sheer marvels of the planet - of water, fire, air, and earth - occasionally flip the blindfolds off our preoccupied eyes. We are the species that sometimes manages to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, to see every common bush afire with God. Sometimes, we see what the Greek natural philosophers saw. Sky and ocean, sun and stars. Rain and rocks and mountains.”

What strikes me about the passage (and the article as a whole), beyond the poetic presentation, is how I feel the boundaries of what we do or where we come from dissolved into the recognition that to be human is to experience the wonder of all things; to experience the micro and macro reflecting each other, or at least to know that we can if we are open.

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“Biochemistry is the chemistry of life, a bridge between biology and chemistry that studies how complex chemical reactions give rise to life.” It’s interesting to me to read the word “bridge” in this definition because my immediate sense is that I completely understand the use and the purpose of the word in its service to the definition of Biochemistry. On the other hand, its presence highlights the way that various subjects that we study still seem like specific and separate destinations in a field of study instead of them being interdependent, interconnected, nearly indecipherable topics along a spectrum of the study of life. It’s as if Biochem (or Bio, or Chem, or TCM, for that matter), are what you get when you look at the whole and want to zoom in a little to take a closer look at life with curiosity or preference towards using a certain set of tools to get there.