Flexibility

Yesterday I wrote about the living green tissue in winter twigs. When you scratch the surface you see it there. But there's another feature that demonstrates these twigs are alive. Bend them and they bend with you instead of breaking. Flexibility is a characteristic of living tissue. And plants are flexible in so many ways. Trees or grasses swaying in the wind, leaves fluttering with the breeze, or at the cellular level, the subtle give and take of tissue in response to internal water pressure. As we begin 2012 maybe it's a good time to remember how important flexibility is to life.