My Time to Bloom

Today, is the first day in August, in the fifty-something year of my life, and I am admiring the few remaining perennials in my front yard. I am amazed at this seeming simple display and readily admit that I admire Mother Nature’s evolutionary processes.

For some returning blooms, the flower heads must lay fallow in the surrounding soil and the resulting seeds will be absorbed as the soil moistens…or the seed may end up a quick snack for a vigilant feathered friend. So, what determines the outcome?  Chance?  Fate?

It is reassuring to me that my lack of horticultural endeavors is rewarded each year…the seasonal colors which dot my garden, change and I let them.

Why interfere?  Nature is not symmetrical.  Just give a close look in your own reflecting glass.

Kinda wonder, though, which variety in nature’s garden shall I be?  Annual or perennial?  Maybe, neither…maybe my cultivation requires crop rotation; where the soils must lay fallow so as to not limit my full potential.

Interesting comparison; let’s explore further.

Existentialism was a topic introduced by my learned father somewhere in my tender, inquisitive, rebellious teenage years.  I guess it might have been even earlier at a time when church confirmation was on the mind of my mother; perhaps last year elementary school, which would have been my 6^th grade. 

I barely recall the details of the classroom aspect of that life-altering period of six weeks probably because I had a crush on the associate minister and I spent most of the lecture time improving the handwriting of the pages of notes I had taken the week before.  As a result or in spite of my regular attendance, theology was thrust upon me. 

That direct insult to my perception of the universe left me thirsting for other possibilities.  Didn’t necessarily believe the good book.  How could I, there was no one living with any tangible evidence and the physical remains of those depicted in such riveting detail upon the pages could not be unearthed.

In my present day, I read of creatures being discovered beneath extreme depths of ice and scads of previously unidentified sea creatures are being studied by those curious minds who must share their existence to study them. These discoveries excite me. My senses are alive with wonder and appreciation.

I am still waiting for religion to catch up with science. I am satisfied that it never will.

So, call me skeptical.  The brilliant man who was my father connected with the universe and became part of something much larger leaving the learned scholars and writers of stories to duke it out.  He believed in just being. His ideology was simple and just: Man was equal to every other living body, whether gifted of breath or dust particle.

Existentialism, a relatively new addition to the English language is defined as:

:  a chiefly 20th-century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad

And…that’s the way my father would have explained it more or less.  Man (woman) must assume, must control and must weigh the pros and cons for every decision. That both increases and limits the burdens which remain self- imposed.

So, now in the garden of life where I am in bloom, is my existence tantamount upon learned survival on an evolutionary scale?  Have those who bloomed and germinated seeds planned on my participation?  And why am I still to discover

how rooted I am to the continuum of life?

As the petals begin to fade in the graying of hair and lessening of vitality, I am all a wonder about possibilities.  Probabilities notwithstanding that I will be unrecognizable and become part of the greatness still to be defined.

I began this entry of my journal the 1^st day of August and it’s now almost Labor Day.  I’ve had time to reflect.  In that same garden which I view from my private studio, the very last of the blooms struggle to kiss the dusk and I’m not sure I’ll see the few remaining in tomorrow’s soft pink dawn.  I’ll just exist and learn my purpose for tomorrow, tomorrow.