“The Insight of Interbeing” →
There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn’t “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought.” Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.
We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate self-entity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are.
I came across this reflection thanks to Michael Wright’s excellent Still Life.
There’s a lot of history and ecosystems that made that peach possible: the water, the tree, the nutrients in the soil, the weather, all the complex lives of the people who picked the fruit and prepared it for sale—it’s all there in the first bite. It’s enough to make your head spin. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls this “interbeing,” the deep and unavoidable interrelationships that make all life possible. This is a “sweet fellowship” we all share, and for the poet, stopping to eat a piece of fruit is an opportunity to let his mind wander toward all these relationships that made this nourishment possible.
The poem he shared in that issue struck me, and I recommend reading it (and subscribing so that you get his letter each week!), though I will leave you with the closing stanza that is still resonating with me:
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.