Blog #4

I've been thinking a lot about dependency, recently.  There are so many social stigmas around the subject that it's hard to sift through them all.  Our culture tells us that you should marry in your life, become "one" with someone else, but then criticizes a loss of independence.  Yet, it also criticizes being too independent, withdrawn from the world, from people.  Too much is bad, too little is bad, but whatever that too much or too little is, it doesn't seem to be left up to us to decide.

When I went to the pond yesterday evening, this subject was on my mind.  In nature, I think there is absolutely an indication of dependency.  Plants and trees are reliant upon the sun, on water, on soil.  Flowers rely on insects for pollination. Insects rely on plants for food. Animals rely on their mothers or parents, on a community, on the earth to give way to a home. I passed by a tree that was smiling at me, and noted that the holes were probably from a woodpecker, another instance of reliance: they need trees for shelter or nourishment. It seems that the 'natural way' IS to be dependent, on one thing or another.

Next to where I sat down by the pond, there were some vine-like branches twining their way up a light post. Vining flora have an interesting kind of dependency, the need to hang on, to wrap themselves around another object.  Stretching out their limbs, they reach for something stable, then grow their way up and around, letting their bodies bend and coil on something completely foreign to themselves.  They are unabashed in their dependency, letting their vulnerability be on display in all its rawness.  I'm not sure about what happens to plants such as this if they grow and cannot find a stabilizing structure.  Maybe they grow out on the ground, maybe they die without the necessary support.  Either way, without the help and solidity of something that is not a part of them, maybe even not a part of 'nature', they never reach the height they would without it.

When I was growing up in my first house, we had a clematis plant growing up the light post outside by our driveway.  I think a couple of our other neighbors did as well, in various shades of purple, fuschia, magenta, indigo.  I'd lay out on my driveway with my cats, drawing with sidewalk chalk or bending plants in to halos for my head.  One particularly warm Spring day, I remember lying down with my back on the hot, grainy concrete, my head right to the side of the light post.  Studying the Clematis, I couldn't figure out how it kept itself climbing on such a smooth, matte surface as the metal pole.  It had nothing sticky or suction like on its thin, brown vines, and with so many heavy flowers, thickly surrounded with leaves, it seemed against reason that it should be able to twine so high.  There seems to be something in the Clematis' nature that is meant to hold on, meant to grow with something close to it.

I think this is a great part of what makes plants like ivy and clematis so interesting: they seem to have an emotional need for touch, for connection.  They hold a yearning and ache just like all the rest of us.