I found myself contemplating a flower and realized I was only seeing it from one angle.
Jesus told me to consider the lilies of the field and to take no thought for tomorrow.
I wondered if this meant I shouldn’t worry about working. If the flowers are beautiful without toiling, then why should I toil?
Then Lao Tzu told me to act without forcing. I realized Jesus wasn’t telling me to do nothing. He was telling me something about the measure of creation. The flower does what is within it to do. Nothing more is required.
Eckhart Tolle suggested that the flower doesn’t worry about where it came from or where it is going. It doesn’t dwell on its experience as a seed or fear its inevitable return to the soil as food for insects and fungi. It simply exists as the flower it is now.
I began to see more than the flower I had originally been looking at.
Don Miguel Ruiz reminded me that the flower doesn’t exist alone. There are many other elements at play: soil, water, sunlight, insects, weather. The flower lives in relationship with all of them, but it doesn’t need to make any of them into something they are not, nor mistake any of them for what it is. The flower is still the flower.
In the midst of all this pondering, I heard Michael Singer ask:
“But who is noticing the flower?”
Ah.
I am not the flower. I am aware of the flower.
The flower doesn’t need to become anything other than what it is, yet everything that needs to be done is accomplished. It contents itself with being a flower. It doesn’t dwell on its earlier stages of development or fear what comes next. It participates with its environment without needing to control it.
Once again, I consider the lilies of the field.
Now, with a fuller view, I fall deeper into contemplation—until another voice pulls me back.
Alan Watts asks:
“After all of this philosophy and contemplation, have you ever taken the time to stop and just smell the damn thing?!”
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