I was walking the trail on Naxos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, heading towards the reputed birthplace of Zeus (I quickly bailed at Arios Spring when my knees and hips told me to).
We passed beside a hovering rockfall where a piece of Naxos had once broken free from the heights and shattered into an interlocked mass above the trail.
Madeline commented on the energy demonstrated in that self-caught interlocked group of shattered boulders. It had me thinking of the difference in energy between inert substances and life.
The broken stone has an obdurate energy defined by gravity and relative positioning mediated by entropy.
Life, on the other hand, has accumulative and growing energy. By collecting and binding the various elements of light and water and stone, living trees and plants accelerate the dissolution of inert matter. Living things break dead stone down and reorganize it into more life.
Life grows and transforms and becomes much more than the sum of its constituent elements. A quality much more potent than any gravity defying assemblage of shattered stone.