Crown Shy in the Desert

Content Warning:   Themes of emotional harm, exclusion, isolation, hostile environments, and power imbalance.

Walking by the Lake. Noticing the Meadows and Willows and reeds. Each in their place. Each flourishing despite the parching heat, the extreme conditions. The right plant will flourish in the right conditions. It will even bloom in extreme conditions if its location fits.

How do we find our right place? Where will I find the place where I flourish?

What’s interesting about plants is not only that they will thrive if given what they need or fail if what they need is withheld. But that they will adapt. They want to survive. Growing Spikes and thorns. Thick skin or toxic sap. Holding any resources which come their way tight. Because they must survive. But to survive they cannot share. There is no room for cooperation or collaboration. This is how it must be when the environment is harsh, toxic, and does not encourage an easy life.

But this is not the only choice. In healthy old growth woodland every plant is in its correct niche and flourishes. There is competition, and it can be fierce, but it is also an arrangement that works for all of the members of the system. There is cooperation. Networks of support. Trees talk to each other, warn of danger. Through mycelium networks vital knowledge is exchanged to help all parts of the system flourish together

Is this the issue then? Am I a woodland being in a desert environment?

Those around me have spikes and thorns. They hoard resources while I try to communicate through delicate tendrils reaching out. The tendrils rebuffed. Poisoned to protect their zone. Protect themselves. But it hurts me. It burns. I try to stretch out my branches to gather more light to take in more energy. But these are also pushed back. Toxic chemicals searing them to a halt.

So to protect myself I keep an air gap between them and me. Crown shy. Never truly entwining. Connecting.

This is my response. The air gap. Which they constantly push into. Greedy for more of what I would willingly share but they feel they must take to be only theirs. They see my way of being as weakness because they’ve forgotten the strength of the woodland. They think their survival modes are the only way. Maybe they are right.

But I refuse to be forced to evolve into the creature they are. I am not like them. I never will be. I refuse them and they attack harder. Because I am a threat in their ecology. A forerunner of what could come when the hostile environment becomes habitable again. It takes pioneer species to bring about that change, like mangroves reclaiming land from the sea.

I then am a threat.

To them. To their way of life. They are not evolved to survive in a healthy system. A positive bionetwork. So they resist. Kill the invaders. And it harms me. I am torn, rent, and poisoned. They beat their spikes against me.

I draw back in. Try to increase the air gap. Pushing me smaller and smaller.

How small can I be? Will they ever be satisfied that I am small enough? Do they need me to be dead? Is there no room at all for me in their world?

There would be room for them in mine.