God — if one exists — bestowed upon the world a most precious gift. This gift, unlike God’s others, is rare and extraordinary — so rare that even the angels don’t have it. But there is no gift without a price; similarly, there is no blessing without a curse. This gift is growth — growth in all things.
If what the Holy Bible says is true, The Tree of Knowledge itself started off as a tiny seedling in rich soil. This means the truth of humanity — the fruitfulness and pleasures of sex, the joy and pangs of labor and the transition from an unsullied soul to one beautifully tainted with sin — was contained in something as minuscule as a seed.
Growth changes us in and out. When one’s eyes are kissed by growth, they begin to view a world with a different kind of clarity — a new dimension that our young, untainted minds blinded us from. This is the blessing and the curse that is God’s holy — or unholy — gift to humankind.
It’s inevitable and unsolicited; it’s delightful and horrifying; it’s gorgeous and hideous; it’s the difference between a growing apple tree and a growing tumor that’s cancerous. Growth can be beneficial or fruitless, but that’s up to us. Growth can be positive or painful, and that’s entirely up to fate.
In the end, nothing is left but the remains of our growth; a butterfly cannot be a butterfly without losing the moldings off the first body it inhabited then tearing through its cocoon. However, we cannot bemoan the moldings of our fragile humanity, not when what flourishes from the dirt bares something greater than what our delicate outer layers once contained. I want to be a butterfly, a mighty tree that bares rare fruit or a great mountain formed from the most disgusting series of natural disasters.
My life is a large bag of seeds, and the world is my soil. In some places, I will grow; in others, I will be buried in the ground — desperately waiting for a taste of Mother Nature’s tears. After that taste, I may grow into a mighty tree or a feeble beanstalk. And that’s the greatest mystery; because ultimately, it is up to myself and fate to decide — all at once. However, I’m going to continue to record my own growth, with another gift that God — if one exists — bestowed upon me, the gift of writing my own or another person’s reality.
Above all, growth is magical and adventurous, and I get to write all about it.
