Today, I am inspired by the diversity and complexity of life…and for the meander of life experiences. Each environment we put ourselves in causes us to adjust, to evolve…to shed traits and beliefs that no longer serve us in any fruitful capacity, and also forces us to strengthen and keep those traits which serve us. Mutation and selection…this is the way of evolution.
And what, then, of “Free Will” of woman and man? To do what we want to do, to be what we desire? All of this, but while working within the confines of our environment, meaning the limiting thoughts and conditioned responses that are determined by not only our immediate environment, but by our past conditioning.
Flowers and plants are rooted in a stationary state, having evolved sexual provocation through scents and lustful beckoning of visual stimuli… all of this in order to attract experiences TO them. I speak of insects sucking their nectar, carrying their genetics to distant meadows, housed in fluffy pollen granules…and also inside seeds, to be consumed by the passing hungry animal who is overcome with the sweet sustenance of the fruit bearing plant.
And yet we as humans, capable of such greatness, and with limitless boundaries, are sometimes stifled and stuck in the misery and hopelessness in our own minds. This is not to say that we do not struggle, and thus do not evolve….but sometimes rather than face the natural evolution of our own story to achieve something greater, we choose to remain bound by fear, rooted to the ground we stand upon, stung by the the hurt of lost love…of disappointment…of unrealized dreams and ambitions. We seek to numb rather than to let these old habits grow dry, crack, and break off in the forceful gale of change. We instead harden and solidify in place, angry at a world to which, ironically, we emphatically replied the word “no, I cannot change.”
We could learn a lot from remaining quiet and blessed, and looking to the meekness of nature, who, at its humble core, is programmed to welcome the natural evolution of things, to glide on the wind into the next meadow and never look back. Who, indeed, knows what lies ahead of any one of us, except change and growth, if only we let it happen.
REGAN ROSBURG : MFA 