LifeViewed from high in the stratosphere you are a thin layer of life sandwiched between the atmospheric and geological layers of the planet. At this range you are the biosphere, a hollow shell at its thickest not more than a thousandth part of its 8,000 mile diameter. A living membrane, you burrow down into the earth, swim in the seas, fly through the air. You were probably born millions of years ago as a simple cell in the liquids of the cooling planet and, successfully adapting to and evolving with its changing conditions, are now an infinitely complex web of interdependent species. Latest estimates are that there are about 12 million species on the Earth at present, with around 70 going extinct every day. The human species is one leaf on this vast and ancient tree.As an individual human being you need your fellow human beings - to be truly human is possible only within human society. Inasmuch as you take in and take on others so you become them. Looking out you see your own (headless) body; looking further, you take in other people. By making room for the whole of Humanity you become it. Similarly, by extending your sympathies more widely you take in the animals, insects, birds, fish, reptiles and plants around you. Upon these neighbours you depend; without them you are nothing. The whole of life is really the only life. When, for example, you stroke your cat you are
expanding beyond your human neighbours to take in an animal neighbour,
member of another species. Embracing it in your sympathy, caring for it,
understanding it - all this is possible because in essence you are capacity
for it. Your boundaries now include it. Just as you are face to no-face
with another human, so you are face to no-face with this cat. If you then
look out further to the surrounding inorganic environment, your eyes belong
not only to you personally, and not only to the human species, but to
all of Life. You are now Life looking, and in that looking meet and make
way for the planet, the next level of your being. |