The magnificently wild intelligence of nature surrounds us and of course embraces our own sapient being too.
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This feral genius is to be found as much in the common place as well as in the extraordinary and the spectacular.
These two everyday plants grow here in a rosette form, their leaves holding tight to the earth as they spread laterally out from their centre, like the expanding ripples in a limpid pool.
This is their own particular way of avoiding the voracious grazers of the Dehesa.
At the same time, it gives them a resilience against trampling by the thousands of bovine and ovine hooves.
In this way, they grow low and in intimate communion with the supporting soil.
Yet, they are not fixed into one way of being and of expressing their vivacious selves during the brief flame of life.
For the moment, grazing ceases they will spring up tall and statuesque, their leaves released from their caress with the earth below.
The wild things know that their very survival resides in the process of change and transformation.
Those that are fixed become extinct in the ever moving animate world.
Photo: Thistle and Mandrake at Saladaviciosa. Courtesy of the author.