Evolution

 There is a point in the evolution of a flower when revolution takes place. It is an instant, a mere dot in all the time it takes for the flower to bloom, to open its petals and give its beauty and fragrance to the world. One Pico second before the bursting, the flower was only a bud, an embryonic form of what it will become. Then in an instant, faster than there are instruments to record, it burst the concealing shell of the bud, and becomes a fragrant flower.

Up until that point n time it was becoming. It gathered energy from the soil, the sun and the air, while growing inside shell that formed the bud. An onlooker would not see this internal activity. such an onlooker would see a bud sitting on a stalk; hardly distinguishable from the greenery around it. Its striving to blossom would not be an observable phenomenon to the outside world.

The instant it opens, that flower changes its environment. Where there was only green, there is now a splash of color. The world is now altered by the appearance of a colorful flower where there was only a bud before. The same is true of a seed, a caterpillar, a bird a soul.

One instant there is one form the next, a bursting forth, a new form, a more exalted form of life.

Excerpted from my Book Beyond Personality.

The photo is of me at the Mendenhall glacier in Alaska, behind a sign saying don'y go beyond this point.