We have bodies made of cells, and cells made of molecules, and molecules made of atoms, and atoms made of particles, and… it’s Turtles All The Way Down. It’s also turtles all the way up. Our bodies are part of an ecosystem, which is part of a biosphere, which is part of a planet, which is part of a system, which is…
We emerge from all of these things moving in parallel. Sometimes the parts seem to be lost to the whole that they form. Sometimes there is balance and parts coexist with their wholes, both true at once. Sometimes the parts, seeking independence, lose cohesion and kill the whole.
Sometimes humanity forgets that they’re part of a world much larger than any one of them or their species. We are equals to every insect, plant, and bacterium on this planet; our prevalence does not make us less animal at our cores, does not take us out of The Cycle of Things. We are not special.
Where does my body end and the air begin, apart from the categorizations humanity has created to understand these things? When I touch another, skin to skin, would you know our edges on an atomic level? Could you tell us apart under a microscope? What makes me not you?
The experience of control does not decide the lines of the self. Do you manually beat your heart? Do you control every cell of your body? When your gut turns over, was that by choice? Did you choose to feel pain? Do you control your perception of the color green- could you make it red?
The experience of self decides the lines of the self. These are the parts that move together; this is the whole that emerges. What stops the parts of more than one being from moving in parallel aside from lack of knowledge about how to cohere?
What if, in the right circumstances, you are me and I am you? Have you never been irrevocably changed by something such that a piece of it lives within you? Have you never consumed or been consumed? Have you never yielded yourself to create something larger?
Are there true ends and beginnings, after all? Or are we unable to look at ourselves from further up for lack of connection, unable to comprehend that the lines we’ve drawn are not absolute truth but instead drawn for convenience and survival?
There is a piece of you in me, and a piece of me in you. The lines between us exist because we choose to hold them there.