Your True Tree Self

Conservative and liberal?  Are you one of those? But which one? Did someone tell you which one? Do you pick one? What if you think you are one, but are actually the other, or maybe both at the same time?  What if everyone is both but there are many kinds of "boths"?

Confusion often precedes clarity.  First, you need to clearly see how you are confused by something that is clearly both simpler and more complicated than it seems. How could it be so? How did it happen? How could it have happened to "me"?

If you are a smart conservator of liberal-minded traditional values, you know that both this sentence and this intro ...AND this discussion are about to cut you in two and twist your limbs and dig deep into your roots. But please stay and learn about yourself for you will truly grow. :)

Here is the quick of it. The 'world' was made and then it changed. The classical Greeks invented tons of new 'everything' with a very liberal outlook on social progress, experimentation, and tolerance of learning and diversity AND extensive exploration, cultural interaction(s) and mixing and much more. The Romans stole, adopted, and adapted all of this Greek greatness -- and from the Phoenicians - another cosmopolitan society -- and added it to their own very dynamic and diverse 'classical' society. The Greeks and Romans celebrated their own transformative greatness and quests for ever more excellence and Western society continued to do so even after both of these civilizations were diminished during a period of time historically called the Middle Ages. Supposedly, these Greek and Roman ideas were 'reborn' during the Renaissance, and they continued on to be the liberal and liberating values that we so preciously conserve today as our great classical traditions. Mid to late medieval universities arose at the start of this Renaissance, and they used books that they had neglected to preserve/conserve during the early 'Middle Ages' and that were pulled from Muslim areas, libraries, and universities -- all to rekindle this liberal educational process and conserve the great spirit, thoughts, and achievements of the classical past.

Hopefully, that paragraph both showed and explained how and why you are confused about who the "you" in you is. If not, maybe this simple and yet confusing example might help you knot it all together.

 The first agriculture was not wheat seeds planted in the ground. It was fig twigs just stuck into the ground -- yup, cut twigs stuck in the ground grew into fig trees. Yes, you can still do this today. 1) Cut fig twig and 2) stick in the ground 3) Done - a new tree -- or is it an old tree now 'new' - or just the same as that original tree ...it is that same tree right? This is 'revolutionarily' a new tree that is just the old tree's DNA in a new example of it (a clone), literally the old tree and not a new tree at all, but it is a separate and 'other' version of it. A faster and better way to do this and the way that all fruit trees, and most nursery trees, are made today is to graft (attach) that cutting/twig to an existing root structure that already exists. Yes, two different trees become one. If your legs walk and have silly looking feet on them and your arms reach round and have less-funny-looking hands on them; so also, all trees are really two different systems attached in the middle -- two trees that become one. The 'upper tree' is above ground and uses photosynthesis -- air/CO2 and light -- to produce sugar that it uses to build much of its substance with and from. The lower/subsurface tree (root(s)) is below ground pulling water and nutrients up from the soil and mycorrhizal fungi networks to join with the sugar energy and make the tree's physical essence. Both of these trees are about the same size and doing something very different.  Both need the other to survive.  You can graft trees in many places but grafting one tree's roots to another's trunk and branches is very common. 

Yah, but which is the "good" and original tree and which is the free-loading, imposter, and con-artist tramp -- the other bad people that are anti-me and my goodness? Am I the top or the bottom tree?  Which are the conservatives, and which are the liberals? Are ‘you’ your top or your bottom? Of course, everyone wants to be the smiling face with a brain and not the bunghole. Be careful, you are about to cut off your genitalia. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you this resolution. Every new innovation is liberated from the world of possible ideas by the hands of craftspeople and then passed on [tradition comes from a root word that means hands -- to "hand down"] from generation to generation though a process of conservation which both conserves the liberal/innovation ‘process of change' and the actual changes -- and will both be preserved and celebrated in the 'now' and in the future.  If being both the top and bottom of a tree isn't enough, 'liberal' and 'conservative' are really closer to your right and left.  If you can decide which side you want to keep and which side you can part with, you are ready to cut.

Liberals love to conserve the environment by walking on sidewalks paid for by socially progressive urban politics in cities funded by traditional and asset-accumulating/curating corporations and their taxes, production, and employment -- who are driven by both patented and trademarked industry-leading products that grew out of innovative and technologically transformative research and development programs driven by a search for change and progress in order to build a new, better, and deeper foundation under a tall, grandiose and long-enduring civilization which conserves a tradition of life-affirming and liberating improvement and a dynamic freedom to grow, change ...and stay the ‘same’.

I hope my summary is well grafted/crafted and now you know why you are a knotted and entangled mess full of sugar, limbs, and conservation and liberalism.

Happy growing and cut with care.