Water is life. Life is also water. The relationship goes both ways. Here’s some water…… and here’s some more, on the same mountain on the same day…

The first one is water drops suspended in air. The second is air, suspended in water. When the sun strikes them, the effect is pretty much the same.

They appear the same, because in each case the light is reflecting off of a boundary — one between water, air and gravity. If you look carefully at the image below, you might see not only how water can be held in the air without falling, and what happens when the water and the air join together with the light and the ground that they all touch…

Rain on a Spider Web on Fall Mustard

Glowing in the red, late afternoon sun. The spider, too.

Plants are a dynamic tension between water, air, light, and soil. The spider in the above image lives in their tensions. In comparison, the lichen below lives their tensions directly.

Snow Melt Caught on Lichen…

…in the cool, morning sun of mid-February.

These patterns made by the reactions between water’s energy and gravity continue in the plants that have grown out of their forms…

Water Droplet Patterns in Blooming Lichen

Life is a tension. Everything on Earth is held in that tension: the molten core, the gravity, the rotation, the magnetic field, the tension of orbit around the sun, the bending of space that enables and defines that journey, birds waiting out a late winter snow …

… ocean plants that colonized dry land by joining together into a self-supporting communal form …

Lichens on Red Mountain, Thompson Canyon

… volcanoes wearing down with weather and gravity …

Red Mountain, Falling Apart, Thompson Canyon

… aerial life anchoring itself to their ruins while it grazes on the light …

… and many more. They are all tensions between light, air, soil, water and gravity. They all hold this tension, taught as a spring, and follow the lines of energy that come from its bondage. This is the energy of the stars. It is earth’s story, because Earth is a place in which these energies focus in specific ways.

Spring Puddle with a Skim of Ice

There are those bubbles again! 

Entropy is the principle of winding down. According to the principle of entropy, everything in the universe is losing energy and seeking stillness — everything except life.

Bubbles Rising Through the Moment of Freezing Water and Stopped Right There

Beauty is the concept of stopping entropy.

It is also the agency by which humans detect dynamic balance — or, if you like, life.

Tomorrow, back to the Botanical Garden.