All Together Now

Driving down the street the other day, I noticed a flickering in front of my car. I slowed down and made out the figures of two birds, one fallen, stationed in the lane before me. The fallen bird was clearly dead, and probably hadn't fallen as much as had been run over. As much as I could see, the standing bird was nudging the body of the fallen, urging it skyward, pushing it alive. It took two hops away, then returned back to the certain corpse, prodding once more in vain before fluttering over my hood and into the air from which it came.

Later on I watched an overwrought documentary in which physicists explained how nothing ever really touches. Cells respond and electrons activate with proximity of energy, yet there's never really anything pushed together to the point of touching. But that's taking into account that we're separated in the first place. The bird tells me everything is always connected.

If you argue that all is not connected, explore the alternative - we are all alone. There is no halfway. Where do you come from that you are not connected to something? It's a bleak acceptance of your mind's perceptual limitations to think that everything is separate from you and therefore containable. Put it on the shelf, ignore it, chop it down, build it, tear it to pieces, keep it away.

There's an programmed idea we like to perpetuate that insists on fractioning reality. That is a person, that is a dog, that is a building, that is the ocean. Yet on the most elemental level, we are comprised of matter and space. Mainly space. In fact, there's not much matter in anything at all, and the particles vary only to a small degree. So it's all held together by what? There's an absurdly vast interconnected space between everything from the most minute atom to the ends of our comprehendable universe. And no one knows what it is.

Schopenhauer writes, "After death you will be what you were before your birth." Carbon dust, either scattered into the void, or absorbed back into the web.

One way or the other, that bird suffered. I was there to witness this very real display of denial and mourning. The emotions we attach to our soul are only chemical delusions, but the space inside is real. It brings us together and tears us apart, even though we've never really touched, and we never were apart.

posted by ZHorton at 8:39 AM