Prologue. I’ve aimed high in this post. Too high. No matter, in aiming for the stars maybe I’ll clear the fence out back.

Show me an individual radiating light and joy and I see someone who is one with the blossoming out from within him or herself. Show me a dark, closed in scowling face and I see someone who for whatever reason has hit a roadblock, is stunted, frustrated, has his or her spiritual roots sunk in dry, rocky, infertile soil.

When I look around I am sometimes saddened to see so many darkened furled faces, like flowers tightly closed against the black chill of night. Sure, there’s laughter and hilarity, but it’s a brave face put on to mask a silent underlying sob. When I see such a soul I sometimes ask myself “something has gone awry, what could it be?”

But let’s step back a bit.

All life is a blossoming out from within. At conception a new iteration in an inconceivably long chain comes into being. The dance of life flows on. Whether single cell or human being comprised of billions of coordinated cells, growth and development occurs. It is a great organic coursing towards the next generation. An ongoing dynamic interaction with the surrounding environment, a drawing in and inclusion. An incorporation, a swelling approach to the moment when the next generation is somehow, in some way, precipitated into being. Then, there is a new conception and the Great Flow of Life continues its stride forward.

Every living being participates, all creatures great and small sweep forward. And for all but a very few, a mere handful, there is no thought involved.

I watch my son grow. From before he was born, doing his little womb dance, until this very moment he has been taking in, growing in body and mind, and straining upwards, challenging and testing himself. He is moving towards full, active, functional membership in society. What will that take—twenty, twenty-five years in all?

But the society, the community, doesn’t that have a life course as well? Doesn’t that blossom out from within too?

It forms each of its cells—it’s members—in its own likeness. It conditions them. It uses instinct, custom, ritual, and that great human communicative tool, the brain. At the community’s conception was also born… a God!

From the womb we began experiencing the world. Our mother’s and often father’s voices have been with us since we were a tadpole tied through the umbilical cord to the womb’s lining. The conditioning started then and continues to this very day and moment.

We blossom out to full and richly active, functional participation in the group from within. Unless of course…we don’t.

For, what if community loses its way, what if its God grows old and dies? Will the conditioning of its members still hold validity? What if the conditioning no longer speaks to and inspires the countless blossomings out from within of its citizens?

If you’ve made it this far I have taxed you enough, dear reader. My apologies. I fear the distance between what I’ve tried to say and what I did is too great.

And I didn’t even make it to Love! The fullest, richest flowering of light and joy.

Oh well. This post, and indeed this Omphalos Cafe blog, is part of my blossoming out from within. It is my song.

What’s your’s?