Natural

Baby birds fall out of their nests to be devoured alive by ants. Wildfires vital to forests’ health burn up all the critters, cute or not. Look at nature, really see it and what it does, and realize there is nothing in the universe that entitles you to anything beyond sure death.

Many think that everything must naturally work out for them because the universe or God or some benevolent spirit has a special plan for them. Maybe it will work out. Maybe it won’t. Maybe they are one of the baby birds that manages to stay in the nest. Maybe they aren’t. Do the birds that live to fly away think it is because they inherently deserve it? Perhaps they do.

Take in a mountain scene and it is beautiful, is it not? But in of itself it is not beautiful. It only is interpreted as such when it is processed through our minds. We decide what it is and so project our notion upon it. So it is with everything in our lives. Society. Culture. Religion. Money. All of it only has meaning because we all decide it does.

However, these fantasies of ours carry real weight. I can’t be with my wife unless some bureaucrat says it is okay. Because we were born on different sides of imaginary lines humans have created, we must pay office clerks special paper we’ve traded our time for in order to get other pieces of paper stamped. This permission is needed to live our lives the way we want. If we were to go together to certain places on this earth, I might be killed as a race traitor, because we were also born on different sides of another imaginary line.

This is all heavy. We have made it real because we have all decided that it is. But none of it is natural.

The power of our mind in our lives is absolute because, for us, it is the universe. Realize that the only thing you are owed is death; this is your only birthright. So between those two sure events, do your best to enjoy the fantasies you like, try not to take part in the ones you don’t, and if you find yourself on the forest floor covered in ants, try to take some comfort that there really was fuck all you could have done to prevent it.