In our culture, there is a story about strength and power. As a young boy, I was told that the strong stand alone. They become who they are by their own efforts. The strong are independent and do not need to rely on anyone else.
They resemble Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or Overman: a lone figure stands on a rugged cliff, facing away from us. He gazes over a sea of mountain peaks and swirling mist.
When we spend time with plants, we uncover a different story. It’s an outsider’s tale, challenging the usual ideas of power and survival.
Watch a vine. It doesn’t stand upright without support. Instead, it reaches for a fence or a branch, maybe another stem, and in doing so it slowly climbs to where it wants to go.
It can only do this through interdependence rather than independence. The surrounding species support it and in return it supports them. A mutual entanglement that serves each other’s self-interest.
Visit a meadow and you’ll quickly realise, if you’re paying attention, that nothing in it exists in isolation. Watch the tall grasses lean together. Clover spreads between their roots. The soil holds everything in a web of fungal exchange, mineral transfer, and moisture distribution.
The meadow is a community of mutual weaving. That doesn’t mean it is all soft and fluffy. There is competition. There is self-interest. But both are held in balance by the relationships of the whole.
If you have ever tried to pull one strand of grass out of a meadow, you will soon discover how connected it is to the organic network around it.
You don’t build resilience like a lone survivalist in a remote stockade. It’s not just about one person, their guns, food supplies, and water. You do it in relationship with others.
This is worth sitting with because it goes against everything we have been taught about strength, power and survival.
When we look through this particular lens, the world sees receptivity as active, not passive. It sees interdependence as strength, not weakness and it sees relationships as resilience.
Plants have known this for a very long time, and humans knew it too before the birth of nations, city-states, emperors, and masters.
What do you think? Leave your comments.