Thoughts...

No quote for today... I have several in mind, but they are at home and I am not, and I am not sufficiently advanced to transcend space yet ;-). I was sitting on a bench today. To my left was a "barren", dry hillside. Directly in front of me (and across a street) was an artificial forest of trees planted by residents. To my right, a parking lot.

I looked between the hillside and the trees, and it was the hillside I found most appealing. It is dry, mostly dirt. A few desert plants cling to life, and likely support a small population of animals. The trees are quite beautiful in their own right: a mix of species that would be unlikely to grow together in the "wild." Yet the trees did not appeal to me so much as the hill. Why? Because the trees require support. Take away the humans, and most of them will die. A few may be drought tolerant and survive, but the rest would die. And they were placed in their location. On the hillside, seeds blew in or were carried by animals; roots spread. No one had to 'cause' it to be what it is. It is 'of itself so,' to borrow a term from Alan Watts.

And the parking lot? To be honest, I noted its existence and otherwise ignored it. It is a dead thing to me. Now, an old parking lot, full of cracks and crevices, with plants and weeds clinging to life... That is alive. Why? Because no one is forcing it to a particular shape any more. It is simply existing, changing, living. A maintained parking lot is constantly forced back into shape: cracks patched, lines repainted. It is not allowed to be 'of itself so.'