The Wisdom of a Dandelion

My cousin was swinging from the old maple in his backyard.  I joined by giving him occasional boosts into the air.  Being the concerned seventeen year old female cousin that I was, I inquired about his love life.  He told me of this girl in his class with blue eyes and swoopy blond bangs.  I looked to a dandelion that grew besides the maple and suggested he bring it to her.  But he told me that he didn’t want to pick it that “we should leave it there for everyone to enjoy.”  Such a thoughtful answer really caught me off guard.  Here I was supposed to be teaching him how to go about life when he incited such a virtuous piece of wisdom upon me.  I thought about this for a while and realized the whole idea of thinking that we can own anything we see is really detrimental to society as a whole.  That if everyone was to pick every flower that they saw for themselves or someone special, that it would be the end of all wild flower and in a chain reaction the end of life.

In Ishmael, a book by Daniel Quinn, a man responds to an advertisement created by a Guerilla seeking a pupil, they speak telepathically, learning lessons of the world.  Ishmael describes there to be two kinds of people in the world, takers and leavers.  Quinn wrote, “The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man...The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world" (Quinn 239).  Takers exemplified by modern society and leavers were the people of ancient cultures and tribes such as the Native Americans who believe in living in harmony with nature.  The takers seem to think that everything is of service to the human race.  The book goes on to suggest that the moment humans thought that they could act as ‘God’ that this marked the beginning of the demise of the human race.  My wise little cousin, by leaving that single dandelion allowed for it to propagate in the form of several more dandelions.

            The current collective mindset, the takers mindset of, “take what you can get” is not a sustainable mentality.  The world has limited resources and the human race is very inconsiderate to this reality.  But even in knowing this I feel a need to have ‘this and those’ things to survive in this world.  As if the world has created all of these false needs for people to fulfill, to keep people busy until someone figures out what’s really going on.  Mircea Eliade suggests that the human condition is that of struggle that “the modern world is in the situation of a man swallowed by a monster, struggling in the darkness of his belly.”  The modern world, the monster describes the current state of society and the act of being swallowed representing materialism, the need for work and the need for things.  He goes on to saying, “so he in anguish thinks he is already dead or on the point of dying, and can see no way out except into the darkness, Death or Nothingness.”   This second part, says that society often feels hopeless or destined to live a life of suffering, of service to the great machine.

            The most well-know literary example of a society swallowed up by its fear is George Orwell’s 1984.  The book fallows a guy named Winston, living in a radically oppressive collective society.  He locks eyes with a girl at work and falls in love with her.  He tries everything to avoid being swallowed up all the way by the thought police, but in the end it is a lost cause.   Some people believe we are heading towards the same sort of oppressive society as 1984 but others such as Karl Marx suggests we are practically living it.  Karl Marx said that “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”  Basically that when electing someone to run the show that we only hope that we can choose the lesser of the two evils.  But the fact that society accepts the voting process we accept this illusion of freedom.

            Charles Bukowski in his famous poem The laughing Heart, encourages people to take hold of their lives saying that “your life is your life/don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission./be on the watch. /there are ways out./ there is a light somewhere./ it may not be much light but/it beats the darkness…”  Bukowski suggests that though society may have a large impact on human life, that there are still things that one can do that can give us light in dark.  He encourages people to seek those things and hold them close, that these things are the things that really keep us alive. Eckhart Tolle in, “The Power of now,” says that these things are “all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, [and] inner peace” (17).

            Philosopher Carl Jung advises that knowledge and self-awareness is key in not being ‘clubbed into submission.’  He says that “it is, unfortunately, only too clear that if the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption... the salvation of the world consists in the salvation of the individual soul.”  That by quieting the mind and looking inward one can find something like salvation.

     Though the wold may seemingly be working against the human race, or rather the human race is working against itself; I still believe there is a glimmer of hope for us so long as we do not give up.  Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is destined to fight evil for the rest of her life and finds it discouraging that she can never make it go away completely, but finds worthy purpose in fighting to maintain the balance of good and evil.  This should be a good example for any person.  Keep fighting for ourselves and for the good of all people because it may always be a battle to maintain the good in the world.  If we stick together in self realization there may always be dandelions to admire in the spring.

           

Bukowski, Charles. "The Laughing Heart." The Best American Poetry. Web. 10 Mar. 2011. 

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. New York: Bantam/Turner Book, 1995. Print.

Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. Print.

Marx, Karl. "Famous Marx Quotes - Philosophy Paradise." Philosophy Paradise. 2006.

Web. 10 Mar. 2011.

Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of NOW: a Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Namaste Pub., 2004. Print.