Experience. Look at trees as you walk through the woods. See how they grow. Are they straight, do they look like bent elbows, are they tortured looking , or do they seem perfect, perfectly aligned, perfectly symmetrical?
All living things react to their environment. Perhaps that is why I hate contorted tree varieties—they have been contorted not by the environment but by human intervention. They seem to me to be ugly stunted things.
Nothing that has been shaped by nature seems ugly to me. When you look at a beach pine, torn to bits, stunted, low growing, I think that’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because it describes a interaction between the earth and one of it’s denizens.
People are shaped in much the same way as trees. The reason I am writing this is because I was thinking about how my experience with my environment has shaped me.
For ill or for good, we are all shaped by what happens to us.
I was talking to one of my daughters yesterday . She is in the process of trying to understand why she is the way she is and how she can change and grow beyond the storms of her childhood.
This made me reflect. I too have spent long years picking apart my childhood, my early adulthood and the ways in which I developed mechanisms of coping which leads me to who I am today.
So often our coping contorts us, leading us away from who we are. It is hard after awhile to differentiate between what we might have been to who we seem to be.
But, this is the randomness, and the awful beauty of nature. We work on it, it works on us.
We become. We are becoming until we die.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 