Beauty – Adaptive or Arbitrary

A number of days past, I made a post titled Wildflowers where I pondered the evolutionary adaptations of plants.  How their beauty, shape, and the perfume of their flowers attract certain pollinators to ensure the propagation of their species.

Naturally, I simply enjoy their beauty, regardless of how it came to be. 😊

Then yesterday, I stumbled upon an article discussing the theories of “adaptive adornment” versus “arbitrary beauty.”*  And I must admit, those terms are much more scientific and deliberately descriptive than my own ponderings.

It seems that Darwin had a second theory apart from natural selection – sexual selection.

Fugitives From Ourselves

Yesterday, my post was about the need to get back out into Nature to promote both our physical and mental health.  What constituted the path to true happiness.  The outward journey to inner healing.

So I felt the need to balance that today with this quote about the inward journey.  This is the toughest journey of all.  And it’s something we often try to avoid.  It can be a scary trek, but it’s also the most rewarding.  Making contact with our spiritual selves.  Without all of the distractions from the external world.

The quote is spot on.  Sometimes people lose themselves.  They become automatons.  Traversing the same trails every day.  Speaking in clichés.  Allowing platitudes to fill the mind.  Avoiding self-examination.

A little time spent in quiet meditation every day is a step to getting back in touch with our real selves.  Unplug from the technological world.  Disconnect from the external illusion and find your authentic soul.

Photo: I chose this pic because this isolated cabin in the Ozark mountains is a good analogy to our inner selves.  Yes, in the material world it’s an external physical structure, but it can symbolically serve to represent our inner consciousness.  Our soul.  Our particle of awareness.  Our gift from the Source.

It is surrounded by a vast external world of distraction and illusion where we often flee.

Come home and relax for a spell.  Sit by the fireplace.  Reconnect with your spiritual self.  Expand your consciousness.

I actually stayed in this little cabin a few years back.  It was a great place to get back to Nature.  Away from the frenetic pace of modernity.  And away from our self-generated hubris.  Not only a place to heal in the outdoors, but a place to make that inward journey in peace and solitude.

In Metta

Call of the Wild*

I’ve been doing a lot of stumbling lately.

I really like that word.  Its main definition is about walking in an unsteady manner, being clumsy, to almost fall, or to make an error.  Blunder.  But I like the other definition, that of unexpectantly coming upon something – like truth.

Now that’s no error.  That’s magic.

Happiness

I like this quote because it truly cuts to the heart of it.  We can not find happiness in the external world, or through ownership of material possessions.  True happiness is an internal state of mind and the mind can’t find its way there if it is living in the past, or focused on the future, or by thinking that something or someone else outside ourselves will somehow deliver it to us.  In a pretty package with a bow on top.

It can only be found in the moment with love and through grace in actually living.

I must say for me, travel, being in motion, taking in the real world around me with all of my senses, helps me to live in that moment of spiritual experience.  Just like the moment of this sunset 🙂

 

Busy Living

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice really, get busy living or get busy dying.”

– Andy talking with Red in The Shawshank Redemption.

I’ve always loved this quote.  It seems simple enough, but there’s a lot to it.  Some people say we are in the process of dying from the moment we are born.  That’s an organic process.  Can’t change it.  Can’t stop it.  But we can change what we’re doing when we’re alive.  While we’re still breathing.

Forget Civility, How About Just Having an Adult Conversation?

I, like a lot of friends I know, have become a little quieter in cyberspace these days.  Why?  Because of the lack of civility in human discourse out there.   Of course, there is nothing surprising by that statement.  Anybody out there in cyberland has witnessed, or may have been a party to, a discussion that has turned drastically evil.

The evilest one I can remember was where one very confused gentleman, I use that word “gentleman” very loosely, responded to a very factual statement of mine by saying he had my ISP address and was on his way to my house to: “. . . rape your mother and kill your whole family.”  Nice guy.  Apparently, intelligence, in any measurable form, was lacking in this individual.

And such responses tend to scare people off from wanting to engage any further.  Which may have been this person’s objective.  No intelligent response, so they had to threaten me with violence.

Silence is Golden, but Mantras . . .

You can fill in the blank in the title.  I might say . . . “are miraculous.”

***

I can remember back in college, I had friends who used to wear their headphones constantly.  They told me they couldn’t study without listening to music.  And I always found that hard to believe because if I’m listening to music, the only other thing I can do at the same time is dance.  And I’m not so great at that either, although I have fun flailing about 🙂

I mean I can’t even go to sleep listening to music.  Music just seems to engage some part of my brain that carries me somewhere else completely.

And totally.

Dragon !

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles and postings on the Net lately about Millennials.  And a lot of it is very derogatory and carries an overall tone of blame.  Blame for what?  Apparently, there is a blame game now where if it looks like you’ll be delayed in reaching some of society’s dictated milestones, such as marriage, children, and owning a home, then you are defective.

In fact, people falling in this category are more than just defective.  They are downright utter failures.  And those in this generation acquiring a higher education are also called fools for racking up student loan debt.

Of course, if you visit the pages like LinkedIn, the general tone is that if you’re having difficulty achieving the American Dream, regardless of who you are but especially if you’re a Millennial, it’s because you are incompetent and lazy and simply haven’t learned to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.  It’s also assumed that you do not know how to prioritize your purchasing power and always spend beyond your means.

If you were only like the commentator who walked 20 miles to school each day, uphill, both ways, and forwent buying so much as a candy bar until they could afford to buy a falling apart car with the money they earned mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs until they became a self-made . . . blah, blah, blah . . . judgmental bigot?

I find such types of gross over-generalizations to be pretty ignorant.

The Destination Was Her

It’s hard to describe,

truly meeting someone.

When eyes open,

Hearts synch.

 

A special soul,

To embrace,

Enfold, entwine.

 

But there were many separations.

Space-time matrices to traverse,

Miles,

Life Stages.

 

Two nurturing souls.

Playful,

Understanding.

 

Horizons expanded.

A mystical wonderland.

Alive and pulsating.

An endless flood of sensation.

 

Time shared.

Bonds forged.

 

Then a withering flame.

A magical land,

Turned landscape of loneliness.

The dichotomy of dissonance.

 

Beauty everywhere.

With heart-tie gone,

There could be no gravity.

 

The mark on the map

was never the journey’s end.

The geography was never Earthbound.

The destination was her . . .

Her heart.

 

 

Photo: From light years ago.  A special flame.

What’s in a Name?

Those of you who follow my blog know I’m constantly remarking about how powerful and fun words are.  I love words.  And if you can tell a story and manage to raise the image you’re trying to paint in another person’s mind, well, that’s when storytelling becomes art.

I love it when words can be used in alternative tenses.  Past, present, and future.  But they can also be used in multiple fashions.  As a noun, adjective, and verb.  All three.

But have you ever seen a proper noun be used with such multiplicity?

Nesting

“Reality” is a word I find troubling.  For one, it implies that we have a basic and comprehensive understanding of some situation or event or location or person.  But generally speaking, we don’t.

We have limited perceptions.  They are limited by our senses and by our interpretation of events based upon our past experience.

That word “reality” also seems to carry with it the concepts of being finite and permanent.  When in “reality” nothing could be finite or permanent.  Everything, and everyone, is in a state of constant flux.  Change.  Ever morphing into the next transition.

Coffee

A couple of days ago my coffee pot died.  It happens.  Machines reach the end of their productive years just like us living, breathing beings.  Usually sooner though.  Entropy.  That eternal state of decay.

Of course, when a machine bites the dust one of the things we think of is, “Did I get my money’s worth?” How many years did I get out of that coffee maker?  Well, that sparked some memories.  Not all that pleasant.  And they began with the why.

Why did I get that coffee maker?

Horizons

Photo: A beautiful image from my wanderings in the Southwest.  It might seem odd that I chose this pic for Emerson’s quote.  After all, this horizon seems confined once your eyes meet the mountains.  But actually, the horizon goes on.  You know there is more behind the mountains, and the clouds add that depth as they gracefully stretch into the infinite.

There are many illusions and distortions in our lives.  Those mountains in the foreground look close, but they are really quite distant.  You discover this as you hike towards them as they seem to forever retreat from your advance.  And once you reach this apparent obstruction, this natural barricade, you can see that the desert plane boundlessly unfolds in every direction.  You can get lost out here.  Lost physically and mentally as the vastness unbinds you and swallows up your soul.

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