In animal and insect life the physical body seems to be the embodiment and articulation of a single self. Built for mobility its members serve highly differentiated functions, they work, and work in a team. An appearance of freedom for this life is belied by the need to run around maintaining itself, its coherent purposes. In contrast, vegetative life is a diffuse armature on which an indefinite plurality of expressions can accumulate, flowers, fruits, leaves, branches, roots, tendrils and so forth. Any of these can seem to be a face of the plant, and so gain the appearance of an autonomous life-cycle of its own, although also, clearly, remaining merely a contingent dependent of the entire organism. There is no fixed number of leaves or branches, pruning is no more than an adventure. In fact the independence of mobile life is as illusory as the self of a flower or a twig, or much more so. The sense of dependence, of connectedness, of the branchings of a single life, becomes obvious at the level of soul. All earthly life is a tree in the cosmic garden, our life, a leaf or flower, drawing its shaping power from the generous sap and its identity from pure contingency.