"Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams."

—Haruki Murakami

Quote of the day on the Internet. 

If we really believed that, we would be ecstatic to be alive. 

I'm not seeing a whole lot of that lately.

Today I'm taking a turn from Talking about life, the universe, and everything and talking about flowers. 

Hold on, Jo, talking about flowers is talking about life.

"Earth, 114 million years ago, one morning just after sunrise: The first flower ever to appear on the planet opens up to receive the rays of the sun."—Eckhart Tolle

Plants had already populated the earth. It's complicated. Ferns produce more ferns without flowers by producing "spores" on the underside of their leaves. Trees produce more trees from cones, and the Banyan Tree "walks" by way of a limb touching the ground and sprouting, thus making a new tree. That tree does the same, and so on.

Plants that flower, however, were late bloomers.

The first flower probably did not last for long. And probably for a long while, flowers were an isolated and rare phenomenon.

One day, however, a critical threshold was reached, and suddenly the world exploded into color.

Think of this, my dear friends; we could be like the flowers reaching that threshold. The monkeys did it with their 100 monkey phenomenon. One day a single little lady monkey washed her sweet potato in a stream. It wasn't long until all the monkeys on the island were washing their sweet potatoes, and they had not seen her do it. 

There could be, for human beings, a sudden explosive awakening where we pull our noses out of the mud and look to the glories that could be ours. We could see that we are glorious, powerful beings connected to a divine presence. I want to be alive to see it, experience it, and be a part of it. 

I wrote the following for my other site Jo's Store Books and Coffee (as a Christmas idea, and incidentally, about a man named Joe). Since I was into flowers, I am putting it here as well.