Reciprocity

Recently a provocative idea was offered to me. The air we breathe is actually the exhalation of trees and plants. Growing things process carbon dioxide and return it to us as oxygen. As soon as I heard this, I was struck by the realization that this is profound proof that we are interconnected, that we cannot separate ourselves from the reality in which we are immersed.

It was only a small step from that to a moment of awe. And from that, to appreciation, even gratitude. Which then led to reverence.

“Reverence?” you might ask. “Why reverence?”

Well, if we cannot be disconnected from the whole of reality, or the creation if you prefer, then we are mysteriously and mutually interactive. All the time. In everything.

Wait? What? Aren’t we independent creatures?

That leads to another curious reality. All of life cannot be separated. The life that is in me, which we cannot really explain, is the same life that was transferred into me via a conception which transitioned the life of my parents into the form through which life is living me. And before my parents, the life that was in my grandparents, and so on. If it’s true that we have descended from all the creatures that preceded human form, then the same mysterious and inexplicable life force found in the first emergence of bacteria is the life now living me.

Here’s an analogy that makes the point more clearly. If you take a piece of fruit, and extract the seed and plant it, that seed takes the life that was in the fruit which is the same life that was in the tree that produced it, then transfers that life into a new tree. Each tree and the seed appear to be separate, but the life that is in them is only one life. One life passed along through a process we cannot see, and truth be told, we probably cannot really comprehend.

Didn’t I mention being awestruck?

Now here’s the conundrum. Where does that life go when something is no longer alive?

We don’t know, because this life that we are lived by is not observable, or describable, or definable. We can see evidence of life, but we cannot see the life. So when the life is gone, we can only see its passing.

Every single moment life is living me. And you. That is the same life in all other living things. One life. Many expressions. All part of a whole. All reciprocating. All interconnected. All mysterious, even magical, though of course, it is not magic. Somehow it a single cooperative, reciprocating design.

Here’s one more amazing thing. Quantum physics now tells us that we are unknowingly entangled with the particles that make up all of creation.

Awestruck seems all the more inadequate to describe our reality.

Now if I can only remember these profound ideas as I stumble through the day at hand with all the misleading signs that I am somehow separate from the rest.