Heroes Not Zombies

It is impossible to understand anything in isolation. If you really want to understand something you have to consider it in its contexts or environments. I think that plants make that point beautifully. Think how a plant cannot exist all by itself. Think how it connects to other parts of nature in order to live, to grow and to reproduce.This time of year you can see an amazing diversity of strategies that plants use to spread their seeds.

Wind dispersal can carry the seeds to some pretty unusual places –

Some of those places are more useful to the plant than others –

A quite different strategy is to hook onto passing animals. I’m not sure if this is a Scottish term or not but we call these “burrs” –

These are such vivid ways of showing us the interconnectedness and interdependences of nature.

Humans are the same. We spread ideas, thoughts and even feelings. We can spread them deliberately, or randomly, but in neither case can we control where they’ll end up!