“Every life bears in some way on every other.”
- Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones
This line from Susan Griffin’s profound investigation into the ways our lives are interwoven through war has been echoing in my mind frequently in recent days. Perhaps this has been prompted by the upcoming anniversary of my heart transplant – that day on which another’s life, and death, bore so intimately on mine, and continues to. Living with my life so intertwined with another’s has brought an expanded awareness of how my life, my choices, my actions bear on the lives of others.
This truth echoes throughout ancient wisdom traditions -- in the indigenous recognition that all our relations -- animals, plants, water, earth, stone -- are kin; in the African concept of Ubuntu -- “I am because we are;” in the Buddhist precept of interdependent co-arising. We know this in our every breath through the reciprocal exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between all plant and animal life on this planet. It is in the very nature of the universe – in the immediate effect of one particle upon another; in the way that being observed changes an electron wave into a particle; and in the way the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can create a cyclone to arise on the other side of the earth.[i] It is in the symbiotic relation of trees and mycorrhizal fungi, and of trees to each other – in the ways fir and birch grow together, reliant on the fungi to facilitate the mutual exchange of nutrients, of carbon and water through the network of roots, and of how the mother tree nurtures the young saplings at her feet.[ii] These truths of the interrelatedness of everything on earth, in the universe, in the cosmos, I know in a very embodied way.
Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (affectionately known as “Thay,” meaning “teacher”) beautifully described this Buddhist principle of interdependent co-arising, which he called simply “interbeing”:
“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. . . .
We cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. . . . ‘To be’ is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing” (Peace, 95-96) .
What a wondrous world this is, that we dwell in everything and all things dwell in us. Our lives, our thoughts, our actions manifest in the lives of all beings. This comes with great blessings, and great responsibilities. As Thay went on to observe, the affluence of some is made of the poverty of others, the foods grown for Western markets are made of the malnutrition of those whose gardens were plowed under for cash crops, the power and security of First World Nations is made of the death and displacement of thousands. His is a reminder that, “we are responsible for everything that happens around us” (Peace, 98).
Every time I drive my car, I am responsible for the burning of more fossil fuels, contributing to climate change, polluting the air and the soil. It weighs on me. Even as I testified and wrote letters and marched and contributed to stopping the Line 3 pipeline that would bring tar sands oil through pristine wild rice lakes, in my driving my car I am also the one profiting in corporate offices, siting the pipeline, violating treaty rights, fracking the earth, destroying the boreal forests and all the beings who dwell within it. We inter-are.
By the same token, every time I plant a tree, I help to take more carbon out of the atmosphere and increase oxygenation; every time I pick up litter on the beach, I reduce a bit of microplastic pollution, perhaps save the life of a bird or a fish. I’d like to think that when I treat another with kindness, it ripples onto others. In the years I was teaching, I would take the students in my Women and Spirituality class to visit our local Benedictine retreat center, where the director, Sister Lois, would engage us all in the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness. Each time she would introduce this practice by saying, “We are sending out energy with our thoughts all of the time, so let it be positive, loving energy.” At the very least, practicing metta meditations may go a ways towards creating a kinder, more loving world. Even our thoughts bear in some way on every other.
Anyone who has ever carried a child within her body knows intimately the nature of interbeing, as everything we eat and drink becomes the body and blood of our growing child. The air we breathe, the music we listen to, our anxieties and our calm all affect them. These choices are not ours alone. The quality of that air and water and the very ground beneath our feet are impacted by decisions of governments and corporate executives of decades ago and today -- such as choices to allow or prohibit lead in paint and water pipelines or the dispersion of mercury from coal-burning smokestacks, or deciding the locations of toxic waste dumps.[iii] Would that we all acted with keen awareness that we inter-are.
Those who work the land in small scale ways, in intimate touch with the land itself, know well the way soil, water, sun, animals, seeds, plants, microbes, labor, and food inter-be. As bell hooks wrote when reflecting growing up in rural Kentucky, “Living in the agrarian South, working on the land, growing food . . . I was ever mindful of an alternative to the capitalist system that destroyed nature’s abundance. In that world I learned experientially the concept of interbeing” (Belonging, 118-119). On a visit to a local organic farm, I was moved by the reverence with which the farmer held the sacred soil in his hands as he recounted the years of love and labor that had gone into creating the ideal soil structure in which to grow his crops. The first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in this region, this farm exemplifies the ways the community of people and land and crops together co-create and inter-are.
The pandemic has heightened our awareness of our interbeing, of how quickly the air I exhale becomes the air you inhale, perhaps carrying with it the minute organism that may steal that very breath from us. It may only take a few seconds of air exchange to change our lives forever. Yet, the very thing that has made us so acutely aware of the intertwining of our very breath has also isolated us from each other – keeping families apart; precluding weddings, funerals, and graduation ceremonies; closing schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, restaurants, workplaces, community centers – places where we once gathered together.
The keen awareness of interbeing that is one of the many gifts of my transplant increased the importance for me to show up – to be there for others – whether to comfort or console; to celebrate or mourn; to be with others in their birthing and their dying, their struggles and their triumphs; to dance, to march, to be in ceremony, to support, listen, learn, testify, witness, accompany, create community. Yet because of the immunosuppressant medications I must take to prevent my body from rejecting this precious organ, the very heart that is a daily reminder to me of the interweaving of all of our lives now requires me to sequester myself. It is too dangerous to be much out in the world. Another transplant recipient recently posted that one of the most difficult parts of the pandemic for her has been the way it has curtailed the many ways she was of service to her community. This has filled me with angst as well – not being able to show up for Line 3 protests to offer the ways of healing for which I trained, for friends in the hospital or who have lost loved ones, for my son’s concerts, for funerals and weddings, for family, for friends, and to welcome new babies born into this world.
We are eager, longing to be together again. Yet, as the rest of the world is coming out of isolation, the millions of us who are immunocompromised must of necessity withdraw even farther as the world now becomes even more dangerous for us.[iv] To be able to rejoin the world, we need the world to join us. Just as twenty-eight years ago my life was made possible by the generosity of a stranger, so now do the lives of those of us who have few defenses against the viruses and plagues of the world depend on the generosity and good will of strangers -- others with whom we share the very air we breathe, with whom our lives inter-are.
In the words of poet Marge Piercy:
“ it starts when you care
to act, . .
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.” - The Low Road
I am grateful beyond measure for all that the generosity of a stranger’s bereaved family has given me – the blessings of this life, the years with family and friends, the beauty of the world, and this wisdom of inter-being. Yet, we are not “strangers.” Bound together heart to heart, we are deeply kin, as we always have been, as we are with all beings.
Ultimately, the wisdom of interbeing is that “our being is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin. It is much more immense . . . There is no phenomenon on earth that does not concern us. . .. We have to look deeply at things in order to see” (Peace, 104.)
May we learn to look deeply.
Notes
Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
Hanh, Thich Nhat. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam, 1992.
hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Piercy, Marge. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.
Steingraber, Sandra. Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. New York: Berkeley Books, 2001.
[i] Bohm’s theorem; the observer effect; chaos theory.
[ii] Botanist Suzanne Simard’s work on this, demonstrating what indigenous peoples have always known, has finally found recognition in the scientific community. See her Finding the Mother Tree.
[iii] For a detailed examination of the effects of toxins on fetal development, see Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith.
[iv] For several perspectives on this see:
Covid-19: For the clinically extremely vulnerable, life hasn’t returned to normal | The BMJ
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic
Vulnerable to Covid, High-Risk Americans Feel Left Behind - The New York Times (nytimes.com)