Heroes Not Zombies

Webs fascinate me. They are such beautiful structures woven each by a single spider. How do they do that? Spiders have far more rudimentary neurological structures than mammals, but they certainly have brains which enable them to create these webs. Exactly how they know how to spin a web is a mystery. I also think it’s pretty incredible that the actual material from which the web is made is created in the spider’s body.

I wrote yesterday about the underlying structure of reality which is built upon the concept of a network – nodes with connections. In a spider web, the nodes are where the threads meet and the threads are the connections. The fact that the entire web is inter-connected is what enables the spider to detect the movement of a fly when it is caught on the web, and to know exactly where to find it.

But as that example hints, webs exist, not as separate entities, but in complex dynamic relationship with other creatures and with the environment in which they are created.

This photo is of a complex of wind-borne seeds stretched between several stalks of a plant. I don’t know if there is a spider web hidden in the middle of these seeds. I couldn’t see one. But it is reminiscent of the web I’ve shared at the top of this post. But there needn’t be a web inside this seed group. Perhaps they just all attached onto each other as they were released by the plant, and have formed a structure that looks just like a web, because each seed is connected to several other seeds through those fine filaments which are designed to carry the seed on the wind.

However this structure came about it shows how nothing exists in isolation. Not only are these seeds connected to each other, but they are connected, both physically and historically, to the plants which produced them, and so on back in time to the seeds from which these particular plants grew, connecting back over decades, centuries, aeons. They are also connected to the visible and invisible surrounding environment in which they exist. They interact with the wind, with passing creatures, and with other plants.

When you pause to consider anything from the perspective of its connections, you find yourself following trails which extend both back and forward in time, as well as connections to other objects, creatures, energies, physical and environmental phenomena. Really, if you were to attempt to tell the story of a single seed from the moment you encounter it back beyond its origins, and forward into the rest of its life story, then you’d find yourself lost pretty quickly. There seem to be no limits to the chains of connections and relationships we can uncover for any single object, creature or person.

So, really, nothing is completely knowable. There is always more to discover. There are always paths, connections and relationships which change our understanding of what we see in this present moment.

I think that fact keeps us humble, and stokes the fires of our wonder.