I looked down at the colony of ants amused.  There they were bustling about, busy with the day’s work.  I said, “why do you bustle about in such a hurry?  You travel along these single file lines that you create carrying materials back and forth.  You concern yourself with these projects with undivided attention, even though you are only alive for a season.”  The line extended to the base of a tree, and I looked up at the tree.  And the tree looked down at me amused.  And the tree said to me, “why do you bustle about in such a hurry?  You travel along these single file lines that you create carrying materials back and forth.  You concern yourself with these projects with undivided attention, even though you are only alive for a season.”

I sit with the trees often and I marvel at what they must know of the world that I cannot.  I have breathed in tandem with them for my entire existence.  I inhale as they exhale and they inhale as I exhale and so even beyond the fruit they produce from nutrients of animals like myself dead in the soil these trees are my life partners.  They hold the ground in its place and so it is that I can walk along the edge of a dirt hill without sliding.  So it is that my home can sit between these mountains secure from the drift of soil.  Their roots dig deep and hold the ground steady, allowing for our ambitions as we kill them to construct monuments to our hubris.  And to the rocks the trees must seem to be in such a needless hurry.  And to the stars the rocks must seem to be in such a needless hurry.

I find myself to be a protein carrying materials along the filaments of a bacteria lodged in the gut of this intergalactic creature.  I cannot know its nature or intention, because I am small.  My purpose in its entirety is that I should eat and drink and pee and shit and inhale and exhale and live and die and thereby make some contribution to this machine that is my world.  I dig in the dirt and I cannot feel the mites under my fingernails that will one day eat me as we labor together to build this garden that we might also eat together.  This is my community.

Everything too much larger and everything too much smaller threatens to be invisible to me as I am confined to the limitations of my senses and sensibilities.  Here I am with no inside and no outside. From the bacteria in my gut to my breath upon the forest, my entire body is a tribute to this community which is unconcerned with the boundary of my skin.  Yet in this permeated space in which I am home, not host, to all that enter and exit me, I can still feel alone.  How closed must my eyes be to feel isolated in such an existence.

I am made by these ties.  These interwoven figures that are my sustenance.  In these relationships I find my mind, an unhealthy but thriving thing.  Moving in and out of realms.  Becoming a realm unto itself.  My own thought, my own language, springs forth from this matrix of beings.  From within this one being of which I am part.  Here, in the limited scope of each member’s own vantage, perspective is born.  Born from limitation as it butts up against exposure.  Consciousness emerges as a contingency of intercommunal abrasion, fighting for and against cohesion.  This accidental product that I have called self is merely an impression of the many from the limitation of the few. Few encounters.  Few years.  Few moments to experience the chafe of that all which I cannot reach but am woven into.  I am a small thing.

Would it be convenient to live in a world whose sum was the total of my own exposure? To be the arbiter of truth? Is reality confined to the reaches of our imagination? We are entirely dependent upon that which is simultaneously through us and beyond us. It is this enmeshed network of unknowns that creates the very notion of possibility. The world is not a collection of neatly packaged entities and concepts.  The world is an indefinite amalgamation of perpetually fluctuating question.

What borders do we propose to reduce this dance? To section off and define its parts? To own and explain this infinitum of fluid complexity? Borders are permeable, mutable things.  The boundary between one nation and another, one room and another, one truth and another — sound seeps through.  There is a border sickness in the liminal spaces around such symbolic structures.  And such structures will crumble when the belief in them fades.  For a border is only as strong as the faith in that falsehood upon which it was built.  Such is the wall between inside and outside.  Such is the wall between us and them. Such is the wall between man and beast.  Such is this modern notion of self.

Osmosis. Homeostasis. Matter and antimatter. Here in this stew, from the particle to the pluriverse all aspects of life are a united cause, reaching, falling, clamoring for a moment of perfect balance not yet achieved. We flow in and out of each other, a perpetual interchange, as all of the world strives endlessly together.  Our universe is not made of objects, but of motion. From quarks to galaxies, we spin.  A vibration set forth from some unsettled thing. Some moment of distress which left the all  unhinged. Unbalanced. The explosion. The mythology of separation. The birth of all struggle. And we call this struggle Life.  We call this struggle World.  It is this struggle, this distress, which is the fuel of our existence.  It is the knot in the stomach, the confusion, the pain which perpetuates the motion, as the scattered unity seeks the ever elusive solace of symmetry. And it is this motion in and through each other which constitutes the all.

Like the pluck of a cello string that leaves it clinging to find center, oscillating back and forth. The string wobbles and emits a waveform reality. A tone born of friction and violence. And if this rest at perfect center is ever found, the sound ceases to exist. So it is that all of reality is contingent upon the struggle of pursuing that perfect balance which has not been found.  All of material existence is a vibrational struggle for perfect center, but if perfect center was ever achieved, all things would cease to be. Because in the terrible face of perfection, what is there left to strive for? Because without this motion in and out of each other, there is nothing.

Who among us would challenge this eternal symphony? Who has risen above it to escape the penetrating hum? Who has ever been separate? Humility is a fickle friend who abandons us at precisely that moment in which we are most in need of it. We have defined power by that which has the most power over us, and seek power to the ends of affecting our relative position within the storm. We are a drop in the ocean pretending to be distinguished from the flood. We are clouds of dust fighting bloody battles against the dust within we are dissolved. We are kites in a hurricane proposing to have mastered the wind. 

By what merit does humankind believe itself to have stumbled, somehow, in this boundless tumult, in this measureless torrent, with our handful of senses, with our temporary focus, with our view through a keyhole at one snippet of that illusion we call time.  By what merit do we believe to have captured truth? We don’t even know what we are.

I sit with the trees often and I marvel at what they must know of the world that I cannot.