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Imagine a bulb, a flower bulb, any kind. Try Narcissus. That’s a good start for vain and selfish mortals such as you and I. (Check it out.) Now this bulb will grow as any bulb does, and it will soon disappear, but for now, to begin, think of a growing bulb. You can push the image.

A root reaches down, then another and another. While more and more roots are reaching down, something else is happening at the other side of the bulb, the top, the side close to the surface. It is pushing and stretching. Movement is there but slower than the movement below where the roots increase, thicker and longer, varying in thickness and length.  Some roots die off at the top. Some midway. In time the roots are like an unkept beard. At the top is a figure, a person, legs together, standing straight. The bulb has given birth.

This is not how we grow, of course, but it is how we end up, a body with long history of growth represented by those roots. That’s one image, a physical image, but there is a similar mental image. Looks the same, but now the roots represent thoughts and ideas, another tangle in the mind, and just as the molecules, the proteins and vitamins, fade as we age, so thoughts and memories also fade and disappear as the years go by. Not all. Some memories last a long time, and some people remember everything. (Not me. Now or ever.)

There may be merger, often is.  A root can be physical and mental at the same time, two natures in one form. Think of Freud.

Is there need to add that it is all a miracle? A thought in the mind of God? Again an old poem:

 FLOWERS

We are like flowers.

We begin in darkness,

We quicken,

We stir,

We sprout,

We grow,

We bloom,

We flourish,

We wilt,

We die.

Some think that after death we fade back into that darkness for other flowers to quicken and stir.  Others think that we again bloom and flourish in eternal gardens of unimaginable force and beauty. It is miraculous either way.