Some articulations of interconnection.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. -Muir

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ —a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

     -Einstein

All things are connected.
Whatever befalls the earth
Befalls the sons of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life,
He is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
He does to himself.     - Chief Seattle

           

We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue. ― Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technolog

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.  -Terry Tempest Williams

There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of bein except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one. 

-Cormac  McCarthy
    The Crossing

A stand of trees in a field somewhere in Texas.

           A friend and I recently made a trip to Marfa, Texas to aid another friend; another story. We drove through the night to arrive in Odessa around 3. We stopped here to pick up a Budget truck in the morning. Not wanting to spend money and making it up as we went along we drove around scouting for a suitable place to throw hammocks up or sleep in the car. Before long we found ourselves crossing a cattle guard somewhere in the perpetual industrial zone of Odessa prompted by a stand of trees set back in a field. We found that the caliche road took us back to another paralleling with a pipe gate and this road lead through the stand of trees. My friend slept in the car; I slept in the trees. The night was frigid and the woods alive. These are few of the images I collected upon rising at dawn.

 

Rising

A bird flys,
black,
from a post

A human
carried by,
car,
takes a picture

The sun spreads,
fresh,
cross the visage

fence and field
forground

old mountains
horizon

and in the middle,
you are,
somewhere with
the black bird
soft mountains
and sun,
rising

Listen

Listen
silence; words unuttered; synapses firing,
the woods breathe,
here I feel,
everything stirs; nothing
  stirs,
wind; needles; boughs; branches,
the crisp evergreen breath,
the whisper of morning light through the pines. 

Here
I
am;
here
all
are. 

My impression, the impression I leave, is not my own
   but the shape of the world removed
   the space bequeathed, allotted,  gifted, for "my" existence.

The mind divided is too loud;
fear of life
being in tumult
noise of "self"

Existence is a subtle breath
  whispering to our nothingness

We need
 only listen

about the first fire

lifetimes ago we sat about the first fire
under most of these same stars
staving off the cold night
with its teeth and eyes and claws
its poetry of inverse light

We cannot prepare to live; we live.

We cannot prepare to live; we live.

Removed, by thought,

from the context of experience

awe and rapture dissolve.

All that exists does so now.

The moment is an eternity

of truth and beauty

if only we are present.

Walk, wander, and wonder

So what if you only want to walk,
wander and wonder all the day long.
Is this not your right; is this not enough?

Must we be busy? Must we be
irreverent toward life? Must we be
arrogant in our living?

So what if you want only to live deep.
Is there a nobler, more humble, more
connected living? Is there a life deserving
of less?

A Walking

     
       A breath, a step, a walking; and so we stepped to the moment; the sun again to peak and rise above the woods greeting our consciousness; binding us to the deer, the hawk, the squirrel, the tree; binding all in life.

       We walk, breathe, communicate; meandering into a reality of us; in which we forsake our isolation; embracing our sameness, our humanness, our deaths; in which we affirm why we exist, why anything exists.

        We breathe hope of dieing less and exhale the pain of living more.

The Birdhouse

                This birdhouse hangs mostly hidden from the light of day. It hangs in a chicken coop built a century ago by my great grandfather. My grandfather, Harold Virlyn Barnes, I am told, constructed the birdhouse when he was a boy. It has hung in this spot for at least forty years.

            Evidence of its service to the bird folk lay within. A thin bit of cracked and peeled paint protects not at all. The fat nail heads are but rust. The wood warped, swollen, and cracked. Joints bulging.  Some fragments have fallen altogether to another calling.            

            I like to think of Virlyn coming across this birdhouse, a memento of his youth, in later years and hanging it so that it may be preserved in this retired structure. Hanging it so that in it’s preservation his former self may not be altogether lost; not yet anyway. Hanging it, I am sure, so that in this old coop with chicken wire rusted out the birds may yet for greater length and comfort make use of his youth’s craft.           

            It hung here as my grandfather and his hold on this world fell too to that other calling of decomposition. It hangs now. 

 

                               How many tenants had this

                               tiny home seen?

                               And how many dwellings like this

                               might there be?