we may or may not be tulips.

I've been noticing the tulips along Locust. Red and yellow. Tall and short and full and skinny. Some are taller than the others, and I don't understand why. They are competing for light, and some are winning. All things uniform: soil, exposure to sun. protection from environmental toxins -- why are they not of equal height?

Originally, I thought this was an argument for genetics and predestination. All this stuff about free will made garbage by the unpredictable appearance of perennials. "Of course we are tulips," I told myself. We are of disproportionate bulbs packed in unequal soil -- tulips.

Because I think that. Not tulips, necessarily -- sometimes trees, birds, creeping charlie, and river weeds. I think we are nature--sprouting bits competing for light--and we flail when we forget what we are. (I don't ever want to believe I am better or more evolved than an oak tree.) In the moments I pass tulips on Locust, I think our success and failure must be predestined, and all plans are for naught. All that time I spent practicing the piano was silly. I was already as good as I would get.

Then, I notice that I am thinking, and I doubt that the tulips are. They aren't making choices about their health, aren't choosing to increase their intake of chlorophyll and deliberating over root calisthenics. They do as they do what they do. I don't.

And so I wonder why we've brains at all, as much as they muck up the joint -- needle with the natural, convince us we are separate, unique, the evolutionary supreme. I think my life purpose must be to quiet the brain, and just grow to the light.