A mother's instinct is one of the most powerful forces in nature: stronger than city light.

Place a woman in charge of an orphaned baby. Before long the mammary glands and milk ducts in her breasts will become active, and she will produce milk. In years past, midwives frequently stuck around for some time after their services in delivery were complete — they fed the babies from their own ducts.

Usually, milk production is a result of the voluminous hormonal changes from pregnancy. Usually. Pregnancy is considered a dangerous medical condition. Entire organs develop for its sake. The need to nurture accomplishes some of the same chemical shifts. Emotion influences biology. René Descartes was the worst thing that ever happened to Western philosophy.

This isn't a strictly human phenomenon. On the rare occasions when compassion overrides xenophobia, whelping dogs will nurture stray kittens. Cats with their own litters of little predatory monsters will sometimes nurse puppies — if they're small enough.

Stargazing in the city is an exercise in patience, and imagination.

I live in the country. The stars are so bright here that they reflect on the hood of my Civic. I can play astronomer and never look at the sky once.

But when starlight competes with city light, it's a manifestation of the wave-like qualities of photons. Great shining stars send photons flying for millions of years. Many of them are lost in the jumbleheap of electric light: office buildings, neon signs in liquor stores. It's akin to listening to Tchaikovsky through a hail of trumpeting kazoos.

The sky above the city at night takes on a shade of dark brown. No stars in sight. The signal-to-noise ratio is undefined.

When displaying psychotic features, bipolar disorders are sometimes characterized by hallucinations.

Bipolarity is a rich tapestry. I have nothing more to say about it here. As for hallucinations, DSM-IV supplies this definition:

A sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ. Hallucinations should be distinguished from illusions, in which an actual external stimulus is misperceived or misinterpreted.

Perception in the absense of stimuli. All in your head.

Before my mother started taking lithium, her states of mania and depression frequently bred hallucinations.

Lithium is a metal: the battery inside my laptop contains lithium.

Bipolar disorder is a disorder of brain chemistry. Serotonin, ends of chemical receptors: many tiny, simple things are involved. Bring enough tiny things together, and suddenly you have something complex.

Lithium was once a treatment of choice for both bipolar disorder and some major depression. Not so much anymore. But that's not the point, and the point stands regardless:

Chemicals. Natural and manufactured, hormones and pills of refined metal. Chemicals and behavior.

A little brother is a good thing to be.

My sister bought a pair of binoculars from the Pic-'N-Save on Segerstrom so that I could see the stars.

While our mother cried in the bathroom, my sister took me to the top floor of our apartment complex. There was the smell of concrete and car exhaust but even thirty feet up the air seemed cleaner.

She showed me Orion's belt — three of the only stars we could see. His head and mighty arms, tricks of perception, were lost to the neon. His belt held him in the darkness, billions-old light filtered through atmosphere and electricity and cheap plastic and glass:

"When you look at stars you're looking back in time," she explained.

I would not learn until years later in high school physics that stars are a product of sustained nuclear activity: a very pronounced chemical reaction.

In the absence of stable parents, older siblings often assume the role of parent. We spent two hours on the roof of our Santa Ana apartment complex that night, laughing under the dark and the twinkle of billions of faraway suns.

A mother's instinct is one of the most powerful forces in nature.

Chemistry is beautiful.