THE LIFE FORCE

The Life Force ~ 19 ~ nature’s miracles that these tender leaves and buds, which can be so easily crushed to a pulp between finger and thumb, can summon up such strength as to force their way through bricks and cement. The owner of the house then regretted having attempted to take the creeper’s life. He remarked, “It is just as if it were appealing to me for the right to grow. Now I certainly won’t stand in its way.” And so saying, he removed some more of the bricks so that it would grow unhindered. In less than a year’s time, a fifteen-foot creeper was flourishing against the courtyard wall at the exact point from which it had been so unceremoniously ‘uprooted.’ A mountain, despite its great height and girth, cannot remove so much as a pebble from its flanks. But these tiny tender buds of the tree can crack a cemented floor and sprout up through it. Whence such power? The source of its energy is the mysterious phenomenon of our world called life. Life is an astonishing, ongoing process of this universe—a force which will claim its rights in this world, and, even when uprooted, it continues to exist, albeit dormant, at one place or the other and