We are

Sometimes, there are moments in your life when you have to just sit down, take a breather, relax, and literally smell the roses. Go outside, right now, sit down in the shade of some tree and smell the life around you, smell the grass, the tree you sit below, or, if you live in a city, sit in your garden, out in your back yard, gaze up at the sky and watch the clouds drift by. Are they white, fluffy things, like cottonballs stuck up on a blue poster? Or are they streaks like combed wool? Is there a storm brewing, grey ominous things grumbling across the sky, or are there no clouds at all? Is the sky a warm blue, or a cold one? Does the grass smell fresh, or sour? Can you hear the run of traffic or of birds in the distance? Inhale slowly, can you smell the sea, or the dust of the country, or even the dampness of fertile earth?

Did you do that? Are you calmer now? Did the eternal cycle, the patience, of nature fill you? No? Take your time, our lives are full of stresses, full of struggle, so much so that we have to count every single minute as it slips away from us, as though that moment in time was too precious to let pass unremarked upon. Have you ever stood at the window and let the hours pass you by as you do nothing more than merely watch the world turn, the wind rustle the leaves and shadows make their stately march along the ground? No?

I think, that humans make to much of their life, everyone wants to leave their mark on the world, have they ever considered that with so many marks left, soon there’ll be no world left to mark? Immortality, be it by the written word, memory, or the afterlife according to the various religions, might not be such a great aim to shoot for. What assurance is there, that there is life after death? Why is there the assurance that you, or I, will go to Heaven, Hell, or even be reincarnated, but there is not that same universal assurance that my cat has something to look forward to, that this is all the life they get?

Why is it that the Buddhists revere life so much that they refuse to take the life of even a bug, and eat naught but plants, berries and seeds…when the wolf, the fox, the tiger, take the meat they need? Should not they revere life in –all- it’s forms? Are the predators considered evil then, for eating the flesh of another creature, how can they be when it is but their nature? And humans, are omnivores, they eat both plants –and- meat, so by refusing to eat meat, which would go against the reverence all life has, they are denying part of themselves, aren’t they? And, even the eating of plants, requires them to die, for their potential to regrow be snuffed out forever, such is the consequences of life, such is what occurs no matter how much respect you pile upon the apple you are eating….that is six or more potential trees you are destroying, because you have to eat.

Why must everything be measured, weighed, assessed as good or bad, why cannot it simply be? What is done, made, is of nothing more than matter. Alcohol, drugs, gold; these are but things, drugs are ‘bad’, alcohol is ‘evil’, gold is the root of all greed…but they are mere things, neither good nor bad, they just are.

Just as people are neither good, nor bad, they just are. Sure, some are more disliked than others, but that doesn’t change that they are. Everyone just is, everyone is the same, it’s the choices we make that differ us, but even then, it is all we are. Not good, not bad, just there.