Flowers

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August 27, 2012

Flower homily

Consider:

I water flowers a couple times a week.  The city has these hanging baskets that are put up by a volunteer group and watered.  Many people are involved in making the project work.
Personally, I find the simple non-urgent activity to be healing.  It needs to be done when I say I am going to do it, but there is still a lot of flexibility in when I start and when I get done.  I can take just an hour or I can take three hours.  I can think also that I am offering people a bit of beauty and that might be healing for them.  People go out of their way to be appreciative and I am willing to value that.  They are appreciative of both the flowers and my simple activity in watering them.

Now it happens that my appreciation of the beauty of the flowers is more directly spiritual in some sense than some other people.  Some are civic minded and find the flowers spiff up the town as opposed  to conceptualizing an individual response of themselves to the flowers as some sort of qualia.  Where I want them to own the flowers if it is useful to them so that they can appreciate their beauty, here they have the ownership in the civic structure, where they find pride in that entity’s appearance, and find the flower’s value therein.

So I might live in a spiritual structure that would wish for people in some cases to move toward a more social identification, but I start out feeling some unease about this orientation toward this particular abstraction.  Thus I look around for a unifying concept that reduces my sense of my neighbors as Other.  Understand that my abstractions do not have to be Real but being who I am I will tend to look to finding a Physical basis for my concepts.

At this point,  I think we would all be better served by a little Appreciative Inquiry.  Thus I was handed the following idea:  the flowers are welcoming.

Flower’s coevolved with insects.  Insects were attracted to the flowers, certainly by food offerings, but also appearance and odor.  For the insects, these diverse attractions are all stuck in their DNA.  The knowledge that going to a particular flower is desirable is not so much a nervous system attribute as a DNA attribute.

On the flowers’ side, the flower attracts the insects as a sexual “behavior”.

So I think we can say the flowers welcome the insects.  Some insects for some purposes and in those cases the insects reciprocate the welcoming by performing sexual favors for the plant.

People also find the flowers welcoming.  The spiffiness of the flowers comes from this flower attribute.  And we might also think the spiffiness is associated with the beauty of the flowers.  And we use flowers also for sexual behaviors.  Why does this occur?  We have no coevolution with flowers.  There is no reasonable claim that this response to flowers is fundamentally cultural or racial.  We do have a few clues.  There is regularity in the flowers..  Color is important. The odors might reach very deep into our mind.  And so on.

A decent Neo-Darwinism would leave this alone, pending better knowledge.  Many people are not that careful and will say something about “just an accident”.  But I think we could criticize that if we thought it useful.   But let me speculate in the vein of “just an accident”, that the universe has  physical manifestations of beauty, welcoming, and reciprocity floating around it in a way I can call “lawful”.  Hmm.  Perhaps also in some way a three letter word starting with the letter s?  Nothing vety clear there but at least we can say that it is good to be a mammal.

Of course, the universe has some other stuff too.  Choosing is fun.  What do you chose for the day?
Max

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