Nine-year-old Alastair Barnes of England was walking his dog looking for four leaf clovers. Suddenly he noticed one. Only this one had not four leaves but seven. The statistics show the odds of a four-leaf clover are 1 in 10,000. No one has any stats on seven-leaf clovers....!
Now here we have a conundrum. No, not just trying to explain the odds of nature. That's for scientists. This puzzle is for poets. Or perhaps even theologians. You see, nature is a wondrous gift bulging with remarkable beauties. However, also astonishing surprises. In reconciling the two, the scientist can only deal with what can be quantified. The poet and the theologian, though, are free to question the un-quantifiables.Their minds can soar as far as they permit them to lift above the nature of our earth. Much less exacting this way, but far more exciting.
No one asked young Alastair where he thought clovers came from, but the poets and theologians might surely speculate that clovers -- like the rest of nature -- are the handiwork of something or someone far more mysterious than just evolution. Oh. they'd probably grant the force of evolution is real. What they -- unlike the scientists -- would add is their speculations about the force that set off the force of evolution.
There are great scientific minds who wonder whether such a first-force can come from nothing. So far they have nothing substantial to show for this nothingness.
Poets and theologians, on the other hand, are considerably more venturesome. Emily Dickinson put it this way: "The world is not conclusion/a sequel stands beyond/invisible as music/but positive as sound." Saint Thomas Aquinas put it this way: "That nothingness which the mind experiences as somethingness is what we call God."
And so it goes in this journey. A journey taken by billions upon billions of lives, each at one time or another running across something in nature to make them pause. It is that pause, that question, that has lured lives further and deeper down the trail. Some to mountaintops, others to deserts, but all to a conclusion whose epitaph they themselves write.
Ahh, as for Alastair's dog -- well he just rolled happily in the grass savoring its soft green fragrance.
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3, 4 and 7 are all considered mystic numbers. What does 1 boy + 1 dog looking for 4 clovers = when they find 7 instead....?
ReplyDeleteHow about this question. Not only why are there 4 and 7 leaf clovers, why are there clovers at all?
ReplyDeleteWell, here's one nature-lover who believes that the WHY to that question has to do with a WHO!
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