Like Alike
God and I were out walking today, enjoying a bit of nature, when he remarked to me that a tree is like a community. We played with the idea for a bit, noting among other things, that leaves are like the people in a town, each not much on their own but still providing a necessary contribution to the whole.
We discussed how different kinds of trees paralleled different types of human collectives. Trees which lose their leaves in the winter could be considered like our annual events which are communities in their own rights; things like renaissance fairs, or Burning Man, or science fiction conventions. We noted that some trees grow tall and thin and some spread wide, just as some cities keep themselves close and others sprawl across whatever land they can grab.
We went on like that for awhile, and then I decided to take the analogy to another scale. I pointed to the stars and declared that galaxies were, in their own ways, like trees, and therefore also like communities. For instance, in a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, the arms are like branches and the stars are like leaves. Apart from galaxies are nebulae, and nebulae are like rural communities, they’re loose confederations seemingly just waiting for the population to become dense enough to incorporate.
God told me that if we looked around enough and were willing to be a little loose in our definitions we could find analogies in almost anything. If we’re willing to work a bit, we can see that just about anything is like just about anything, in at least some ways. So I guess the real lesson here goes to the very meaning of life itself, and what I’ve learned about life is that life… life is like an analogy.
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