LES MISÉRABLES, LENIN & THE TREE CALLED "SPRING"

In his classic Les Misérables, Victor Hugo writes that "Animals are just figures of our human virtues and vices, running around before our eyes, visible phantoms of our souls. God presents them for us to reflect on." (Les animaux ne sont autre chose que les figures de nos vertus et de nos vices, errantes devant nos yeux, les fantômes visibles de nos âmes. Dieu nous les montre pour nos réfléchir.)

I got a kick out of reading that, and because the behavior and looks of the rancho's dogs often vividly remind me of people I've known, I had to admit that there was something to it.

That day I needed a lighthearted moment because while reading Les Misérables I'm also plodding through Dmitri Volkogonov's Lenin. That book, using information first made available after the collapse of the USSR, describes Vladimir Ilich Lenin's impact as the founder of Russian Bolshevik-type communism, and the first premier of the Soviet Union. It's depressing reading. Lenin killed a lot of people, and was responsible for the deaths of millions of others who became victims of "Leninism" practiced by Stalin and Mao Zedong.

But, this week, not only have Victor Hugo and Dmitri Volkogonov been my companions, but also a certain noble tree currently splendiferously flowering. That tree has no good English name, but in much of Mexico it's called Primavera, which in English is "Spring." That's appropriate, because a springy feeling is in the air, despite it being so hot and dry. Our page for the pretty tree "Spring" is at http://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/gliricid.htm.

Atop that page you see clusters of white "Spring" flowers on black stems beneath a deep blue sky flooded with dazzling, scorching sunlight, but you miss the effect of the flowers trembling in a morning's moist breeze, can't see and hear the bees buzzing among them, and can't smell the blossoms' perfumy fragrance. Still, you can imagine how pleasing it is to see "Spring" flowering much like the Redbuds in eastern North America.

So, Victor Hugo's smiling remark, depressing reading from the life of Lenin, and these lovely Jabím trees. What does it all mean?

Sometimes powerful synergisms arise when certain seemingly unrelated phenomena end up side by side. Sometimes 1 + 1 = { 2 + a little more }. One thinking, feeling person looking into one starry sky is an example, for out of that 1 + 1  combination a third thing often arises, which is awe and maybe inspiration. This week it's seemed to me that the combination of the three instances of: 1) Hugo's animals-like-human-virtues-and-vices remark, plus; 2) Lenin's history, plus; 3) the flowering "Spring" trees... have conjured up something beyond the three juxtaposed but not clearly related events.

There was this long history of mass murders and perfect callousness with regard to millions of innocent people, but Victor Hugo reminded me that things in Nature (humanity is a subset of Nature) are presented "for us to reflect on." Reflecting on the matter, I decided that in this Universe it's true that unspeakably tragic and destructive events are commonplace, maybe somehow evenly balancing the Universe's joyous creative evolution toward ever greater diversity and ever more artful and pleasing interrelationships among parts. Moreover, standing beneath a "Spring" tree, looking up at flowers resplendent in morning sunlight, that morning Hugo's remark had conditioned me to recognize that something at that moment was blossoming that was beyond the mere sum of three events.

This something was something inside me, a kind of insight that quickly blossomed into an inspiration. The insight was that any mentality that can recognize transcendent patterns and ways of being, can focus on those ideals, and in so doing identify with them, even when the material world all around is falling apart.

Though the Universe may be haunted by every degree of tragedy and injustice, a mind fixed stubbornly on some vision of perfection still can enjoy personal peace and security. Someone or some thing well may imprison a body, torture it or kill it, but as long as the mentality is intact and can focus on something like "Spring" flowers dazzling in fresh morning sunlight, or anything else that deeply harmonizes with one's own makeup -- maybe a spiritual insight or a philosophy, or a strong natural urge to comfort or teach or defend others, for example -- the mentality cannot be dominated.