What if we're all connected?

I was busy this spring tilling earth, seeing earthworms, moving stones, cutting roots and generally getting my hands dirty, sticking them into the soil, and preparing it for some pole beans, snow peas, potatoes, and other natural delights. Anyone who has not dug into the earth to encourage food to grow is missing out on a big life mystery.

This is where my body will be going when I’m through with it. For practical purposes, cremation seems to be the option. It’s quick, tidy, takes up little room, and there’s no constraint on others (if any!) to groom a tomb, or maybe forget flowers. It’s ashes and dust. Good stuff for humus. My mother and father ate some vegetables, and with a little help from Nature, I popped into the world full of minerals and vitamins with all systems ready to go. Isn’t it wonderful? Cycle complete.

So Earth connects us all. And Science News says “Civilisations rise and fall on the quality of their soil…” Rape of the soil, depletion, artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and unrecyclable rubbish are some of modern, petroleum-based civilisation’s great errors. Body and earth are connected, even if we don’t realise it. And we grow or suffer along with our Earth.

Yet we have another connection, as I realised when I shut my eyes and just listened, breathed and watched a new pet I like to observe – my own mind’s meanderings. Sometimes it is so well behaved and astute that I feel lucky. My breath was pushed into the vacuum of a moment’s pause after expiration, and then pressed out after a moment’s retention. And the message came. As each particle of this breathing process came in and out, I took in a particle from the room, from a flower, from the trees outside my window in Spain, from a far-off garden in Pennsylvania, and I thought I detected a tiny portion from Africa, too. Air, ubiquitous air, connects us all. We all breathe, recycle, swap molecules from here, there and everywhere, interchanging one and the same medium. And we are around 7.4 billion at present. We all do this. There is no “my air” or “your air”. It’s just air. Everyone’s, every animal’s, every plant’s air. We’re all atmospherically connected. Will civilisation also fall due to air pollution? Or will air finally bring us all together on another level?

And then, since I received something quite like a gift with that realisation, that old favourite of mine, that funny headbrain, gave me another eye-opener when I asked “What if…?” Yes, if we plants, animals and humans are all intimately connected through air, how is the connection of the distinctly human experience intertwined? I don’t mean feelings or thoughts. Feelings do not necessarily connect. You think they do, like when you fall in love, but they don’t. They come and go. We need to be much more developed to have clean, consciously-created feelings capable of connecting to others and perceiving through emotion, like many animals can and do on a basic level. Thoughts don’t connect either. They divide by their very nature of yes/no, one/or/the/other. So what human experience connects us, if body and earth are twain, and air and life are paired?

It seemed obvious. Our Self-Awareness or consciousness interconnects us and connects us to All. That watching and waiting and observing is a force or power made available to us and used by us, but coming from the remotest regions of the Universe and pervading all. And it is here now. For humans, it is all and everything.

And that’s the Earth-Air-Spirit trilogy for today. Stay connected.