In this message from Aldea’s Growing Pains series, Kathleen draws on her love of gardening to explore how plants can teach us about growth, change, and co-evolution. She weaves together stories from the plant kingdom, reflections on Aldea’s journey through challenges, and the ways individuals and communities evolve through both success and failure.   Using the metaphor of pollination, Kathleen highlights how interdependence shapes all life and how Aldea continues to adapt, thrive, and blossom through the contributions of its members. This message invites us to see our community as a living, evolving organism...one that grows richer, more colorful, and more resilient as we nurture and shape it together   Quotes:   "All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem freshly intrigued by the peony that, after years of being taken for granted, suddenly fails to bloom. They understand that, in the garden at least, failure speaks louder than success. By that I don’t mean that the gardener encounters more failure than success (though in some years he will), only that his failures have more to say to him—about his soil, the weather, the predilections of local pests, the character of his land. The gardener learns nothing when his carrots thrive, unless that success is won against a background of prior disappointment. Outright success is dumb, disaster frequently eloquent. At least to the gardener who knows how to listen.” — Michael Pollan “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir “We are not separate from the web of life, but strands within it—each tug and vibration shaping the whole.” — Thích Nhất Hạnh “The whole universe is one great symphony of mutual conditioning and interdependence.” — Dōgen Zenji “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” — often attributed to Charles Darwin “Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.” — Wendell Berry