27/09/2026
NUTTY SUNDAY THOUGHTS 🌱
I'm potting up one of my little bunya pines (Araucaria bidwillii) today.
I grew this one from a bunya nut I picked up and float-tested to see whether it was likely to be fertile. It sank, so I planted it, watered it and waited. From something fairly unremarkable came a tiny shoot, then leaves, and now I've got a little tree needing more room for its roots. With a bit of luck and a lot of time, it may still be here long after I'm not.
Oddly enough, that little bunya nut got me thinking about Galatians: “Whatever we sow, we also reap.” That's my gender-neutral rendering of Galatians 6:7, but it's the idea rather than the religious instruction that interests me.
I'm more spiritual than religious, although I'm fascinated by wisdom that has travelled across generations, wherever it comes from. I find myself increasingly wanting to look underneath familiar words rather than just accepting the meaning we've attached to them. I think that's part of critical thinking too: being prepared to revisit what we think we know, hold it up against what we've actually observed and experienced, and see what there is to learn.
“You reap what you sow” is often thrown around almost gleefully, as though it means just wait, they'll get what's coming to them. I don't read it that way at all. To me, it's about consequence and responsibility. What we put into the world matters because our choices don't simply disappear once we've made them. Something grows from them, sometimes in ways we couldn't possibly have anticipated.
I've been thinking about that quite a lot this week. I've made plenty of mistakes in my life and undoubtedly have a few more spectacular ones left in me... I've also watched other people make choices I definitely wouldn't make, including some that have disappointed and bewildered me, while also leaving me deeply unsettled and troubled. The older I get, the more I understand that I don't have to carry those choices, defend them, explain them, be defined by them or be pressured into standing beside them. Their consequences belong where they belong. What I can do is look carefully at what happened, be honest about anything I planted or helped to water myself, learn from the rest without claiming it as mine, and let what I've learnt inform the choices I make next.
Perhaps that's why another line in the same passage has been rattling around in my head: “And let us not be weary in well doing.” — Galatians 6:9, KJV. Put those two thoughts together and, for me anyway, there's something hopeful in them. We reap what we sow, but we're not condemned to spend our lives staring at yesterday's harvest. We can look at what grew and why, recognise our own seeds amongst it, learn from what somebody else planted, and move forward with greater awareness of what we're choosing to nurture ourselves.
Which, rather neatly, brings me back to my bunya nut.
What difference does one bunya make in a world this enormous? My first instinct was to answer that by listing all the good things a tree does, but a bunya doesn't have to prove its usefulness to humans to justify being here. It's already part of the living world, just as we are.
Give this little tree soil, water, sunlight, time and a bit of nurturing at the beginning, and its life will become entangled with countless other lives. Its roots will join the extraordinary living world beneath the soil. Its branches will become habitat. It will exchange with the atmosphere, provide food and shelter, and perhaps one day produce bunya nuts of its own. One of those might eventually find soil, water and the right conditions, and the whole extraordinary process begins again.
That's one of the reasons The Bush Tucker Box has always mattered to me. Growing Australian native food plants isn't only about what we humans might harvest and eat. We're planting within an already living system. Many Australian native plants become food, shelter, shade and habitat for native animals, insects, many of which we may never even see. We're not gardening outside nature. We're participants within nature.
Someone ask me recently what does planting one bunya nut really achieve in a philosophical discussion the other day. I think that's the wrong question. One bunya isn't going to save the world, but there isn't really a separate “world” somewhere out there waiting for grand gestures from us either. This is the world we all share: this patch of soil, this tree, the Rainbow Lorikeets having heaps of fun plish, splashing all the water out of my bird bath as I write this post, the animals we share our lives with, other people, the things we choose to believe, the truths we're prepared to face, the mistakes we're willing to learn from, and what we choose to do next.
Small and local isn't the opposite of big and global; it's where big and global begins. We all act local whilst being global every single day.
Perhaps that's part of our responsibility as humane beings too. We can't prevent every harm occurring in the living world, and we're certainly not going to solve enormous problems on our own, but that doesn't make us powerless. We can each notice what's happening around us and ask: what can I actually do here, because it really is up to me...
Sometimes it's rescuing an animal. Sometimes it's speaking up when things are or are not being said. Sometimes it's knowing when not to participate in cruelty. Sometimes it's refusing to simply look and walk away from suffering. And sometimes it's as ordinary as putting our hands into the soil and planting something native that may one day feed, shelter or become part of the lives of animals we'll never even meet.
That's the kind of “act local, think global” that makes sense to me. Not believing one small action will magically fix an enormously overwhelming problem, but understanding that the enormous living system we're trying to care for is made up of all these small places, relationships, choices and lives. We are the sum of its parts...
I can't control what anybody else sows, and I really don't need to. I can pay attention to what grows from it, think critically about what I'm seeing and learn what I can, then come home to my own little patch of this extraordinary living Earth, put my hands back into the soil and be thoughtful about what I choose to nurture and grow.
I think that's also what “let us not be weary in well doing” means to me now. Not that I always know what “well doing” is, or that I get to decide what has value and what doesn't. It's about paying attention, thinking critically and being honest about what grows from our choices, including the things we wish hadn't. It's knowing the values that guide us, examining whether our own choices actually reflect them, and being willing to learn, adapt and grow when they don't.
We can't go back and unplant yesterday's seeds, and we can't choose what somebody else plants. We can learn from what grows, be honest about what we've helped to nurture, stop feeding what we don't want to perpetuate, and let those lessons guide the choices we each make from here. For me, that's where hope and responsibility meet: the past can teach us without having to dictate what we contribute next.
Right now, that's as solutionary as I know how to be: not standing over the garden deciding what everything in it is worth, and certainly not trying to control what anybody else plants, but knowing where my own roots are, taking responsibility for how I move through the garden, and being thoughtful about what I nurture while I'm here.
Today, mine is a bunya. 🌱💚
Maybe yours could be something native too. 🧩🌿💡
© 2026 Tracy-Lea Chapman / Animal Assisted Growth & Learning Australia — AAGALA™ & The Bush Tucker Box
Original words and photography. Please don't reproduce or republish without my permission. Sharing the original post with attribution is always welcome. Thankyou. 💚 🌱
