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They would float like parasailing fairies across the late afternoon fields of my childhood, milkweed seeds on summer breezes. It is only this lifetime later that I realize the deeper nature of their fragile assurance.
Chord theory tells us that the concentrated essence of that which we have come to call the soul, finds its physical reality in the replicated strings that echo through the utterly unique billion iterations of our DNA. The theory also asserts that the word is the thing, that the representation of the conception, emotion or belief shares its chord, and is thus subsumed therein. Likewise is the metaphor subsumed within that which it expresses. Hence does the flight of the milkweed seed both define and become the cosmic liberation of the soul.
Consider the jade plant. Place a severed leaf in receptive soil and the whole is regenerated from the differentiated fragment. Can we similarly reconstitute the stag from its discarded horns? At first blush, certainly not. But then consider the stem cell infused into an injured organ. Somehow, the appropriate course to healing evolves. It is our inclination to seek explanations in complexity. Simplicity may be the better teacher. At a level far below the molecular, the strings of the chord reconstitute the symphony. The jade plant, the neuron, the bone marrow is made whole again.
When death releases us, the living and left behind seek comfort in complex imaginings that reconstitute the departed, whole cloth, in some divine replication of our terrestrial nursery; some shared destination to which they too can aspire. I find the milkweed seed a more instructive guide. Our soul released to countless voyages, sentient flights across the universes, glides across infinite possibilities taking root again in the most auspicious loam
