There's no free lunch, but free will is free

March 22, 2026
Owl Feather Farm, San Juan Island

It’s a beautiful hydrangea blossom, opening slowly in a small biscuit of pastel colors. Around it the bush is just now sprouting little viridescent buds of new-year leaves as the plant prepares for its annual season April through November.

There's no free lunch, but free will is free
Yes, even flowers have free will

But this is mid-March. Hydrangeas bloom midsummer.

Why this one blossom now?

We have a dozen other hydrangeas around our house, none setting forth a bloom, even though they are budding out young leaflets like this one next to the Pilates studio. So why this one lone blossom?

Botanists might credit an unusual combination of environmental factors that have catalyzed one early bloom. Protected location? Not really, it’s on the northeast side of our house. Unique genetics? It’s a division from one original plant, identical to all the others. Extra care and attention?

Not that we recall.

We’d rather call it an example of free will.

Here at Owl Feather Farm we take an expansive view of the many living beings with whom we share these 27 acres. The trees, the birds, the foxes, the flowers, the scrub roses and meadow voles—all are independent sentient beings who plot a path through life under the auspices of the skills and abilities Nature has given them.

I’m fond of telling people, for instance, that our super-popular Rainier cherry is smarter than many people: Each spring it has hundreds of blossoms of which about half set fruit. Then in early June, the tree discards half or more of its baby fruit after making an assessment of its carrying capacity, and how much fruit it should sensibly ripen. In other words, it thinks about things and decides what level of production is right.

If only the Duggar family had that much integrity!

That’s free will. The tree decides all on its own, just like the hydrangea.

Our two wondrous dogs, Bleu and Simon, have decided for themselves that they are here on Earth to love and protect us. No, it’s not because we feed them; anyone who thinks that has clearly never spent any part of life with humanity’s many companion animals. Sure, they mope around pitiably if we postpone their lunch a few hours, but this is just staged drama that represents the attachment to regularity intrinsic to all life. Sulking is a choice.

Not so long ago botanists and zoologists scorned the idea that any living thing aside homo sapiens had either sentience or soul. Visionary scientists have since destroyed that arrogant illusion—even trees and plants have deliberate agency, it turns out—but now comes a neurologist who claims his work proves there is no such thing as free will. Though he focuses his research and conclusions on humankind, Robert Sapolsky argues that individual determination is just an illusion, and we all act in accordance to millions of environmental, genetic and biological factors far outside our control in a long chain of catalysts stretching back in time.

Sapolsky justifies this nonsense by arguing we must create a kinder, gentler society in which “blame” is an antiquated mistake. But absolving humans—or dogs, or flowers—of determinism not only evades simple responsibility, it erases the foundations of love and imagination. One wants to ask Sapolsky if his entire body of work, including his book about it, Determined, represents just idiopathic puppetry.

But why waste time on fruitless debate?

Instead we can step outside and admire the works of Nature, the blossoms and birdsong and spring breezes in the leaves. Then we can go in the Pilates studio, can’t we, and devote a half hour to bodywork that improves our own wellbeing in a hundred ways. We can fire up the stove and cook a homegrown vegetable soup that’s a gift of the land on which we live, a gift we believe is intentional. We can put the horses in their stalls for the night and trade them biscuits for nuzzles and nickers, and everyone involved consciously delights in the ritual.

All that is free will in action. It’s free to all living things. We don’t have to earn it, but we do have to use it. We can surrender it, but it can be reclaimed in an instant.

Once claimed, it can be lasting. Our hydrangea bloom will be with us for weeks, a simple gemlike expression of the will to shine. Then others will join it, a passage in the long song of the history of free will, the universal gift.

—Eric Lucas

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