everything is really everyone

 

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Conventional terms such as ‘the environment,’ and even ‘nature’ itself (particularly when opposed to ‘culture’), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet. 

All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else. 

This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us. These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.

Lynn Margulis, the most significant evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century, had this to say about our entanglement with non-human life: 'No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system. Life is an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our own skin. These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, and part of us. They cycle our matter and bring us water and food. Without "the other” we do not survive.’

The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life.  

‘Life and Reality’ wrote the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts, ‘are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.’

—James Bridle
Ways of Being
excerpts

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