If you could be any tree, what type would it be?
I couldn’t be a tree.
Even metaphorically I can’t think of a tree I’d want to be.
I love our giant Kauri trees – 25ft in diameter, 100ft straight up to the first branch, 2,000 years old.
I am a thinking, moving entity.
I try to think in time scales that make even our Kauri seem like youngsters.
And the idea of roots and leaves has a kind of metaphorical use, the roots gathering the materials for growth, the leaves gathering energy to power growth.
And for me, being me, is about the systems, the ever evolving relationships between biology, culture and creative thought.
The systems created in evolutionary biology can be used by analogy in other realms, and evolution tends to optimise for specific situations is very subtle ways, so can be profoundly complex in ways that very few have even the vaguest inkling of.
I’m just happy being me, related to all of biology, all of culture, all of the creative possibilities of cooperative diversity, in so many ways that I have only the vaguest hints of.
