What is your contract?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JQuksPhbUMc

I was pulling weeds in the strawberry patch the other day. Well, the other year, I guess it was. Growing increasingly irritated and frustrated as I carefully unwound the bindweed tendrils from the strawberry plants, I considered for a moment just ripping them all out of the ground and being done with it. How foolish would that be? Clearly, anger was not the answer.

So I sat back on my haunches and watched a lazy cloud drift across the sky, unaware of me, like as not, just as I would have been unaware had I not paused at that moment to look up. And it occurred to me, as it often does, how small I am in a big world, and how small my world is in the galaxy we drift through as that cloud drifted, and how small our galaxy may be in the larger Universe. And I pondered then, as I often do, the nature of existence, the factors leading to the intricate web of flora and fauna on this little world among so many others.

I am not so wise as to know why we are here, but we seem to be. Just like the cloud, millions of people and millions of creatures go about their daily lives without my being aware of their existence. Now I believe that all things happen for a reason, in both the physical and metaphysical sense. In which case, we can assign any name we like to that reason, be it random chance, God/dess or simply “the Universe.” And if it is all random, we may as well stop considering the question, but I defy you to watch something as simple as a dandelion turning from golden petals to drifting seeds, the more complex metamorphosis of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a child going through all the stages between infant and adult and tell me there is no pattern.

If there is a pattern, some creature / being / thing created it. And, as stated above, there is reasoning behind that pattern. Our planet may exist in a vacuum, but we do not. We cannot. Each living thing has a function, programmed, as it were, into its cells, the totality of which makes it what it is. And so, for the sake of convenience, I began to think of this as a contract, as unbreakable as the laws of gravity, an agreement to perform a given function as long as life allows.

The bindweed cared not for the inconvenience it was causing me. It was simply fulfilling its contract, holding on to another plant, and if you have ever seen bindweed unchecked, it spreads and will make a dense mat of vegetation. It does it quickly, and thoroughly. As it wraps its tendrils around other plants, that plant become part of the dense mat. And what that does in the long term may kill the other plants, but in the short term, it checks erosion and gives other plants a chance to grow long enough to, for instance, bear fruit. Falling rain’s power is dissipated by the leaves and stems, the strength of rivulets remains a trickle and the overall runoff is slowed. Which means the fertile soil remains largely intact instead of being washed away.

In one sense, then, I was the aggressor, interfering with the bindweed’s ability to fulfill its contract. Which once again makes me think of the “might makes right” notion. The bindweed had the might to kill the strawberry plant before it could bear, and I had the might to slow, if not stop that. Had I not planted the strawberry I like as not would have been elsewhere that day, would not have felt the anger, would not have seen the cloud and would never have had this little epiphany. All things for a reason, and at their appointed times.

What is your contract? If you know what yours may be, I am glad for you. What is my contract, I wonder? I do not know. Perhaps it is to simply wonder.