Tylecodon paniculatus bulges and knobs

The contortions of the leafless Tylecodon paniculatus winter body appear like gold nugget in moonlight, if it wasn’t for dead flowering stalks persisting at stem-tips. The fleshy trunk rests in the veld like a hibernating bear, full of stored juices for miraculous resurrection once temperatures rise.

Rhythms of day and night, summer and winter, rain and sun, growth and rest, remembering and forgetting, life and death dish out the surprises of new life eternally. Continual cycles of birth and death restore unlimited effort and vigour continually.

Each generation is endowed with the urgency to reproduce before its time runs out. Constructed from the compost of ancestral leftovers, real life experience is repeated but fresh for every generation of all species, all possible vigour that can be mustered fully restored every time. The will to live is well protected in nature.

This is enhanced by the blessing enjoyed by all living species to forget or never even to know; forget about the trials and tribulations lived through by ancestors, oblivious of the repeated risks and common tests that lurk in the unknown of their own future.

The inability to be daunted by the anticipation of hardship is a key safeguard of effort ensured by the absence of consciousness in most species. Fear is shared by mammals and a little more widely, but we dont know how far. Still, giving up is a luxury reserved for people.

Hope and vigour may thus spring eternal and boundless in all expected to live without doubt or hesitation as Alexander Pope reminded; springing new, better than as good as new, due to embargoes on and ceilings of information transfer.

The chasm that limits communication between parent and child even among consciousness-driven humans, let alone the other species, is a life protector. Even the knowledge of the existence of that chasm is distressing to people, making the absence of reasoning a boon to the brainless.