pine needles

I am sitting in a pine forest, and the ground is covered with pine needles. They lie so deep that they make a soft carpet underfoot. It's rather pleasant to walk on them. And sitting here, looking at these needles, I notice that any individual pine needle is resting on, or making contact with, some others, and those in turn are making contact with yet more needles. There's a whole interconnected web of pine needles.

And seeing this, it somehow reminds me of human society. Each of us has contact with a group of other people: friends, family, lovers, work colleagues. And each of those in turn has his or her own network of contacts. And so it is: the whole of humanity is interconnected in this way.

And seeing all these pine needles, it reminds me, that we can look at these groupings in different ways. We can focus on the individual – a single pine needle, or a single human being – and sometimes it's useful to do that. But we can also take a step back as it were, and see that whole interconnected web, the whole carpet: all these needles, not seen as separate individual needles, but as one large, organic entity. And so it is with humanity. We can see the whole of humanity as one interconnected network, one organism.

And we can go further than that even. We can see the whole of life as being interconnected: one huge biological organism, the biosphere. And if we want to go even further, we can sink into the understanding that the whole of existence is one. Why break it up into pieces? Why separate? Why dismantle everything into tiny pine needles? Let's look at existence as a single organism. This is a more profound way to understand all that is.