Where's the Kansas Board of Education when you need them?

So every now and again I decide to try my hand at bonsai.

Course I rarely get past the planning stage, the trees that I have started are now thriving in some forest or garden somewhere instead of in a small plate in my apartment.

Now part of this is just laziness, and part of it is just general fatigue and burnout.

It's also quite possible that I secretly harbor a fear that, with my luck, I'll die and be escorted to the gates of whatever awaits assholes like me when they die, only to find that God is a house plant, and I'm being deported to a special hell reserved for tree torturers, lumberjacks, and life long vegetarians... (come to think of it, those three groups don't tend to get along that well anyway... Hmmm more support for my theory that God is a shrub.)

I mean think about it.

Most cultures have some sort of plant based concoction that they use in their religious ceremonies. Some fungus or herb or moss or something that they chew or burn or eat, so that they can slip the surly bonds of this mortal whatever the fuck and catch (if just for a fleeting moment) a glimpse of the divine, a touch, a taste, some guidance through the endless chaos of existence.

Some religions (mostly western) talk of the world being covered in dark waters of shapeless void... With this in mind, doesn't it seem odd that some of the very oldest living things were the giant algae?

There were giant fern forests a hundred feet tall covering the earth thousands of years before the first dinosaur crawled out of the muck to claim that which was not water.

The longest living things on earth (that we know of) are the bristle cone pines, which reside mainly in the high Sierra, and can live thousands of years. (The oldest had been alive for more than a hundred years when construction began on the Great Pyramid of Giza)

Sounds like intelligent design to me... or at least as intelligent as most of the folks who preach intelligent design at me.