Desert Flowers
Of all the environments on Earth, the desert seems the least hospitable to life. It’s hot and dry, and unprotected things do not survive. Because we know that deserts exist, we have a keener measure of the value of our lives. And because life is often difficult in patches, like the traversal of a desert, we have a great, romantic metaphor with which to better understand the difficulty in our lives. That there should ever be flowers in a desert, seems outrageous and inspirational in the extreme. Flowers are pretty. Flowers are frivolous and temporal. Flowers bear no responsibility, save for the inescapable requirement that they compel us to wake up and smell them.
Infinity, repeat
Are you standing at the edge of a cliff with a stone in your hand? Have you drawn a breath and tensed the muscles of your throwing arm? Are you feeling strong and brave? Throw then, but take well your guard. For the smooth and perfect stone of your careful selection is racing around the planet to strike you on the back of the head!
The big philosophical questions are inevitably this way. The more zealously you pursue your answer, the more likely you are (if you are very talented and very child-like in your thinking) to finish right where you started, to get hit on the back of the head by the very stone you threw. Math is that way too. Logic is the heart of both. “If this, then that”, and so forth. Run enough iterations, step closer or farther away enough times, and you’ll see yourself, eventually, in the picture you have found - cocky bastard - with that stone still in your hand.
I’m on record as a believer. So it may just be that faith begets proof. I may be seeing only what I want and expect to find. It’s easy to see God in Man, because we want to. But how ’bout Man in God? That too, I’ll bet. Reflections, even from a mirror, are made of more than light. There are those lovely themes, which nature does recur, in scales as grand as small. Things which spin round things, and such. But how much smaller than an atom can our solar system be? Oh, we are great in our ken, but not so great as He. Our sight goes up as well as down, but always to a ceiling and a floor, and never more.
When we cast our minds into those darkly distant places of imagination, what light there is comes only from the candles we have brought. There is heaven here, too, and God in every face. Nothing is different anywhere. Infinity is no closer now, even from this prideful promontory. But, like an avid mouse, I have found her dispersed crumbs. Is this my own tail that smells so sweet as cheese? Or a ladder to another place? I see the steps! As can you, if will prevails. They go up and down, both ways to God, and never do they reach an end. These musings relate to musings on the Mandelbrot Set.