I have come to believe that human beings have roots. We don’t always make conscious decisions where they are planted, but these roots do long for obtaining a grip on something that provides sustenance to the whole of the organism. When imagined in this context, several parallels that make sense when observing with the eyes that we use to understand the natural world begin to mimic that which describes us. As living and breathing organisms within our minds and bodies, we would be foolish to believe that we differ in every way to the rest of the natural world.
As I watch the plants grow from a seed, I watch them grasping at the soil in which they reside and climbing forth toward the light above. They crave water and nutrients in order to stimulate their growth. Without them they perish.
They long for the light.
If exposed to things that are poisonous, they wither and they die. Other life forms can harvest them before they come to fruition. Parasites can leech from them all that is vital within them. Any number of things can halt growth.
Like these plants, envisioning that we as humans also have roots, it is not a distant correlation to consider that we also need the same things. We crave water and nutrients to stimulate our growth. We also long for the light. Without these things, we wither and we die. The interpretations of these needs can be literal as well as figurative. It leads me to ponder the sources of our poison and the sources of the organisms that seek to harvest us before we are allowed to grow and flourish. We live within a world that stimulates us constantly, and we have the conscious and sometimes unconscious choice of choosing to engage with these stimuli. Negative influences are plentiful. From the media that we consume, to the company that we keep within our periphery, we are influenced daily and these serve as a source of sustenance. Like choosing a high calorie and low nutrition form of food, these things fill us up and make us feel satisfied, but at the end of the day we are left feeling hungry and searching for our next proverbial meal. We don’t realize that the choices in sustenance that we are making are feeding our constant sense of emptiness and hunger. We perpetuate the cycle of misery within ourselves. We need to tend to our roots and take care where we plant them.
As a healthy growing organism, we become a part of something greater. I imagine a suburban lawn filled with grass or a forest floor that is rife with diverse plant-life. Everything springing forth from the ground shares common soil. They are interconnected in a way that benefits the other and they promote the health of their neighboring plants by continually feeding the soil and the environment around them. In this sense none of them truly die as long as the others live next to them. When they do wither and die, they aren’t truly gone, but they do feed and become a part of the soil themselves.
When one follows this train of thought and compares its relationship to humanity as a whole we can see that we all prosper to a greater degree when we live to benefit others. We are vessels poised to inherit and develop our own personal wisdom. If we nurture our lifelong collection of knowledge and learning, then choose to share that with those in our vicinity, the singular becomes the whole and we grow exponentially as a result. Every prosperous era of humanity is filled with the remnants of art, philosophy and science that the individual passed on to their neighbors who then nurtured it further to grow it into something bigger. The original purveyor of the aforementioned métier couldn’t fathom the foundation that they had constructed. This should be our greatest desire. I struggle to imagine a greater meaning of life for any of us.
Humans do indeed have roots. We forever long for the light. The choice is ours where we choose to find our nourishment and sustenance. I would plead with all of you to choose wisely. When you find it and you grow, give of yourself freely so that we might have a chance of leaving this place a greater place that we found it.
Long for the light. Pursue it, embrace it, and cherish it when you find it.