On my mind today:
People think in polar terms. They bifurcate into black and white because the gray is either uncomfortable, scary, or a hue that they can't recognize. In the bifurcation process, something is lost. Erased. Crumbled. Smashed down.
Cut a cake in half and dare it to happen without the tiniest crumb falling on the counter. Cut a baby in half and watch it die.
Our need to parse, to label, to identify, to section, to separate is so great that we are willing to chance a loss, even the tiniest amount, to be comfortable.
Sometimes we don't call it "parsing" or "sectioning", instead we say that it is better for the plant to snip off the extra leaves. Easier to eat the cake when it has been cut. Quicker to find our shoes if the box has a neat little label on it.
We even go as far as to call that "work" when it is actually the avoidance of work.
We call that "streamlining the process" when it actually hinders it on a greater scale.
We call it "less messy" to cut the cake and let the crumbs fall where they will so that we have a nice, neat section of sweetness rather than digging into it with our hands and licking the crumbs from the counter since they, too, are part of the cake and took just as much effort to include.
We do that because we are human, and humans like things to be as uncomplicated as possible. Every now and then though, there will be a rare soul who is willing to dig through the unlabeled shoeboxes in the closet just for the sheer joy of the hunt.
The rare soul who will let the plant prune itself and be glad to marvel in the process.
The hungry soul who, rather than chance losing one iota of morsel, will dive head first into the cake and lap it up as if bobbing for apples, icing coating their eyebrows, and the soft underbelly of chocolate or vanilla sponge coating the back of their throat.
The sensitive who will defy the Soloman's of this world and say, "Do not cut the baby, let her live."
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