We Are One

You're a cloud, you're a star and we are one even when it sounds cliche.

By Amy Adams

We quip and spout sayings on a regular basis. Often, they can have deep meaning and inspire or on the other hand, they can also be vague or simply something to say without giving it much thought - “We are one.”

Yes, we are one, we’re all interconnected. That’s not some magical thinking, it’s the truth. You think you’re an individual person, separate from everything around you. But in fact, you breathe in the air around you, taking it in - inhale and it becomes a part of you. Exhale and you change the environment around you. You drink water and that water was once a cloud or a part of the sea or maybe it came from a natural spring from the Earth. Water and its interplay with the atmosphere, with us, with other sentient beings changes form - solid, liquid, and gas.

Our physical bodies are mostly made of water, yet when you look in the mirror that’s not what you see. In your physical body entire ecosystems exist inside you - think of the microbiome - yet that too is outside of our daily conscious life.

The human body is filled with trillions of microbes. Fungi and bacteria outnumber your own body’s cells 10-to-1 and that isn’t even counting the viruses that teem inside your cells. And if we hammer down every single microscopic cell in your body, you’ll find that they consist of particles - atoms and molecules that break down to protons and neutrons and even quarks. Many of these particles that make up your cells have actually existed for millions of millennia.

What separates you from the breath of air you just took in? What separates you from the water you drink or the food you eat? What separates you from the particles that create the cells that create your body?

You exist because of and with everything around you. You don’t consciously think each moment of how through respiration, transpiration and digestion your body interacts with the rest of the world, yet the subtle unseen interchange happens. It’s not a onesided process. Your life doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

You create the world around you.

You exist because of everything inside of you. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars. The heavy elements that create you were made in exploding stars.

Where do you begin and everything else ends?

When it comes down to it, nothing is solid, nothing is fixed. You knew that in your heart already. We are all interrelated and interdependent.Imagine you are a million points of light that flows outward from you and inward as you give and receive to everything and everyone around you. Allow your mind to remain open and free when you feel isolated, alone or separated. Bring this idea of openness and flow to your awareness remembering that your life gives and receives life from existence itself.

The wisdom and words of Chief Seattle-

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.