Prologue: All Living Things Speak Us Into Existence

It is common to confuse the end of modern civilization with the end of human life, to think it’s too late to stop the many crises we face, to forget the lives of other beings. Here, now, we remember those other beings, and consider that something may be more powerful than our own creations.

Our bodies are water, moving with the ocean tides. Our bodies are matter, hungering for the feel of the earth underfoot. Each is a cousin of the microbes in the soil and a relative of the burr oaks up the hill.

I write not about the sixty percent of the human body composed of molecules of water, but of water that moves in the air, flows in and out, rises and swells like ocean tides, flows from high places to low, bubbles over rocks, thunders down from the sky, carves a new path through the soft earth and even through rock. That water is our birth, our home.

Humans have known forever that we are small in a large universe. Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods, all-powerful. And only with this fantasy have humans come to the edge of destroying life on earth. Yet we call this the only way to live.

I walk on the morning grass, dew cool against my bare feet, drops hanging on pine needles brushing against my face. My thirsty mouth takes in water from those needles one drop at a time; from a glass it swallows huge gulps of water, cooling, relieving desiccated tissues.

What if there were another way to live, embedded in a world of living, conscious, sacred beings? What if that were the way to save ourselves?

Each body is multitudes. Thirty-nine trillion microbes among thirty trillion cells:[1] that alone must give pause to any dream of independence. More: my body is the frog perching under the leaves of the yellow bean plant. The fly buzzing my head, and my immediate annoyance. The spider thin and graceful in a corner of the bedroom, the other thick and black on the wall of the hallway, moving too fast for me to take it outdoors.

What if, by recovering the deep knowing of our ancestors, we could heal the trauma that we call normal life? What if we could save ourselves, our grandchildren, millions of children and adults right now from starvation, wildfire, drowning, enslavement, from becoming refugees in a barren world?

Once during a days-long meditation retreat, hot and sweating, mind wandering, I found myself grateful for small flies walking across my face, crawling into my ears, bringing me back to now. It was a moment of grace.

It’s too much to imagine. Yet, without imagining it, we hurtle ever faster toward disaster.

This body is earth. That actually means vast reaches of space with electrons, atoms, molecules spinning and somehow held together, the mystery of solid matter that is merely bits of energy. I mean to speak of earth, minerals, substance, gravity – what we recognize as home.

What have we got to lose? Well, yes, the entire life that we know; yes, safety, convenience, familiarity. What else? What if we could lose the violence of poverty, end our fear of strangers, stop the epidemic of depression, walk away from addiction, leave behind the utter loneliness of trusting no one?

This body belongs here. The winds blow through, the tides move, the earth holds, and some spark of awareness makes its home in this one body called mine, in these bodies we call ours.

Seeing each other, we create each other. We are no more separate than left hand from right.