Cheer The Weed

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu
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Hello Sandy
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I was out walking yesterday and I noticed how small tufts of green were peeking up from the cracks in the side walk and parking lots. Give Nature a chance and it will find a way to flourish even in the midst of a concrete and asphalt world.

Next to the street at the last place I lived there was a tree. I loved that tree. It was very tall and healthy. Every Spring it got a bit taller, increased the size of its branches and put out some more twigs. I knew that once upon a time that tree was part of a forest. The forest had been leveled to make way for the town, but a few trees here and there were left standing. Those other trees were simply cut down and pulled up. Deep in the earth are the remnants of the relatives of my tree.

I pondered the fact that many of our manifestations of civilization, our roads, parking lots, buildings and bridges are intrusions on primeval landscape. And all that Nature wants to grow here is still underground waiting for the opportunity and the right conditions to begin the process. In fact those small patches of green, which we call "weeds," are the first hardy steps, (the advance guard you might say) of Nature's campaign to reclaim its own, original, slowly evolving design.

If this town was totally and permanently abandoned by all human life it may take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years but Nature would eventually break apart all the pavements, tear down all the buildings, swallow them all up and digest them. The grass would grow, the bushes would flourish, the meadows would stretch out and the forest would reappear.

So why the intrusion? Because there's another kind of Nature, called Human Nature. It is out nature to build shelter, to grow crops, to educate ourselves, to conduct commerce and transportation. And so we bend Nature to our will, leave a few trees and some bushes still standing, maybe we even plant a few, but the rest of it we tear down and replace with our roads. parking lots, buildings and bridges.

But the next time you see a small patch of green peeking up from a crack in the side walk admire its courage and brave but futile attempt to reclaim the world.

DB - The Vagabond
Never give up.
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Mining The Heart

It is the living who might be spared if we could quarry the message which lies buried in the heart of all human experience.

Lawrence Durrell
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A person could be content being an observer of his own life if he could find a safe place to stand. I think every person's life is a book that should be written and read. We all share the human story of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure, fulfilled dreams and destroyed hopes. Suffering is wrong, whether it's great or small. But all conditions are faced somehow, in some way, by a creature who has intelligence, reason, experience and ability. How each one of us copes with the demands of life in our own individual way goes to write the history of the human race.

Buried in that history is a fundamental truth about our lives and why we have these phantasmagorias to deal with. It is way too much to expect, in spite of legend and hero worship, for any one individual to unearth the great, golden ore of human nature. And yet there it is. Some people roll up their sleeves and dig, others quit the quarry.

The ancient prophets preached the dignity and divinity of natural law. Who turned the human race away from that rich mine and made us deny ourselves? When did the valuable vein of human experience become wrong, a sin, a destruction? When did the human being become insignificant, slightly better than the beasts?

I like to remember that when I walk down the street I am treading on an edge of the universe. People look out at the stars and sense something so grand that it diminishes the importance of us humans. I look at it rather as an example of how grand we are to be a part of it, and a part that is free to explore every inch of it. And why do we have that freedom? Because we want it. And wanting it is not a sin, it's part of our human nature.

One of the great and necessary benefits I see from investigating and trying to understand, whether it's in your living room or in outer space, is that we are slowly getting away from an old mistaken notion about who we are. We grew used to thinking that there is the Earth and then there is the rest of the universe, and somehow one is separate from the other. There is I and then there is the rest of the people. Two groups: I and everyone else. And, of course, no one else's life is a complicated as mine, I think.

What is your life like? How have you coped with it's dangers and dilemmas and what have you mined from the quarry of human experience? What is the message in your heart you can share with us? What is life like on your star?

DB - The Vagabond