Plastic Illusions

I have been on a nature observance kick for the last two posts.

Last evening I sat by a plastic lavender plant displayed in a decorative pot on a sitting porch. I sat close by and watched a little bee, the kind we use to call sweat bees when I was a youngster.

This little bee went from plastic flower to plastic flower looking for the sweet nectar and probably wondering where it was. The little fellow was confused by the appearance of the fake flower. As I watched it, it was an exercise in futility. The plant looked like a real lavender plant so the confusion is justified from the perspective of the insect.

The bee was persistent, but not satisfied and eventually left.

I wondered about humankind’s infatuation with plastic things and with false things that seemingly give us emotional comfort and visual pleasure. The eye, as magicians know, can always be deluded with slight of hand illusions and with the perfection of human creativity art can form ingenious false images.

There are many areas of my home decorated with fake ferns, false figs and flowering figments of reality.

I don’t look at them as real, but as decoration. The tiny bee lacked that intellectual discernment and through instinct continuously sought reality in plastic.

I think we humans continuously seek reality in the density of form when in fact true reality is expressed only from and in a spiritual perspective. I wonder when we will not be satisfied and acknowledge the false and go for the real?