open skins, veiled nests

Does a tree thinks for herself, or only the forest as a whole? And an ant, does she have individual dreams or is their nest that does the dreaming?

As with us, to whom, despite theoretical narratives of self, a fully separate individual is hard to put in practice in the real world. Us, the soup of experiences and affects we got from everyone around us on every single encounter in our life, cooked in our mother's oven of flesh but seasoned by the world, the saltiness of past accidents and traumas, the pungency from the bacteria in our microbiome digesting the food for us, the spiciness of ancient viruses coded in our very core of dna, the sweetness of the oxygen and water molecules consumed at every moment, in a very literal sense in-side our-selves. The ultimate blurriness of barriers between who we are and the rest.

Emergent at every level, instead of the arrogance of capital I when the i is pretty much the sum of all its human and more-than-human parts, a collective working together towards the function of being a human, like an ant nest operating as one, with each individual not able to explain their role but ending with a result that works. The ant focused on reproduction or the one searching for food, the fighter and the builder, with Life itself always being organized in this nested framework with layer upon layer, micro to macro, co-creating higher patterns at every step. The atoms seen through the eyes of physics being the same ones that constitute the body parts seeing through the eyes of anatomy, or the behaviors through the eyes of psychology and sociology. Until the outer skins of our identity, a microcosmos in itself but also part of a wider culture, in an ecosystem. Systems that are us, even if we can't usually perceive them that way.

How to go beyond this illusion of separatedness, towards receiving the world as a whole (as in deep ecology) and embracing the partially veiled nature of everything (as in object-oriented ontology), drinking from this opaqueness of our surroundings and their infinite entanglements?

While walking into a forest is easy to distinguish the different tree trunks, the diverse families of plants competing for light and nutrients. This lens of eye-level looking can be hypnotizing. But what if we could birdify ourselves, strolling high in the sky looking down to an unified, breathing, living organism. Possibly similar to the view point of a wandering earthworm, deep underground not fully able to identify what roots belong to which in this walls-free categories-liberated world, rhizome that extends and weaves, that confuses while inviting us to a dance with the interdependent everything.

At the same time, in the ocean a wave is not a quantifiable portion of water aiming to reach its beach. It's rather the movement that elevates water at its passage. The reality is in the relation. And is the same with meanings.

Perhaps the forest spirit is not subjective as if only a story in our head, or objective as in a supranatural being in the actual physical world, but rather a metaphor to mediate our perception of it. A way to receive the world in its totality, not as a god but rather a force to break the illusions of thingness of each object, independent from each other, possible to label, to own, to extract, to write neatly about it. The wave that supports the rising in search of its goal of a beach to come, the ineffable weaving of the various layers found in us and elsewhere, peeled from macro to micro, from the feet that do the walking to the chromosomes that created them in the first place, all conspiring in its opaqueness to make nature exist.

Wind does not make a sound, the whispers we hear come from its encounter with the world around.

What if it is sacredness the remedy to broaden our perspective, seeing the spirit world of indigenous animism as the representation of this interactive quality between observer and planet, one that can embrace the veils and complexity of the entanglement – without necessarily needing to explain it?