The Indivisible | Awe, suffering & relationality
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
I preface this text by saying that this is a thought-experiment – well, a thought-wandering – and I’m not a microbiologist or a scientist of any kind. I haven’t rigorously fact-checked this text.
When I set out writing my Substack, I believed that I would explore awe of a specific kind. I guess that was too narrow of a desire. Awe can well up from the joyous and spacious but also erupt from the difficult and heavy.
Recent weeks have been challenging health-wise. I’m navigating the ebbs and flows of my mind meeting my sick body, trying not to disassociate the two and collapse into narratives of being at war with myself: the mental versus the physical.
This sickness is chronic – something that’s been with me for a decade and a half and a little more. That said, I had believed that “I” had “won”. But this “relapse” says otherwise.
I notice the notion of “winning” in conversations on health. Conditions conquered. Sickness triumphed over. Enemies beat. It all feels terribly colonial.
What fascinates me is the “I” – the self – in this health equation. Over the course of this “condition”, I’ve been thrown into learning about the body as an ecosystem. A place of many selves combined as one. I contemplate the self as a concept hardened by the growing individualism that’s part of the fabric of modernity, that slots into the myth of separation: the belief that things are separate rather than entangled.
Growing up, I was taught to think of microbes as the enemy. Antibiotics were prescribed freely. Hands were washed thoroughly, because of “germs” – I’ve put that in quotation marks because that was the language we were taught to use, “we” being me and all the kids around me. All the adults too, when I think about it.
It took eight years of illness to begin to understand my body as many interconnected systems made of matter rendered from my genetic code and a fuck tonne of matter belonging to other beings. These beings, it turned out, were not my evil enemies. They were me. In fact, around 90 percent of me, at a genetic level.
Worldviews don’t just switch; they evolve. (This is important to remember, always). For me, I was still stuck in the binary of good and bad for a long time. The literature reads like this too. Good microbes and bad microbes. Those to be considered allies and those that are enemies. There’s also a lot of chat about “balance”, but too often, balance is portrayed as stasis. Balance is actually flux. Flux is dynamic and, therefore, resilient and has the ability to hold and/or evolve an entire system (which cannot be thought of as fragmented but instead nested in and interloping with other systems).
I also certainly wasn’t “listening” to my body-ecosystem. I observe that anthropocentrism is often extended to our own bodies. Many cultural beliefs tout that the mind is the powerhouse of the human. We – as in our minds – know best. Better than these bodies that have been learning how to live since the universe was created in our continuous emergence with the world (satire). This is how I approached my sickness, at least initially.
I also thought I was “smarter” than these mere microbes because I am a human with a big intellect, supposedly. However, these microbes – as I perceived it – had bested me. They were winning this battle between us. I came to learn that species of different microbes together form complex communities within me, and incredibly, they fortify these communities with what are called biofilms, slimy protective outer layers. I went from imagining primitive creatures swimming around in the soup of my insides to envisioning city-like matrices with hive intelligence, their existence entwined, not only with one another but also with me, to fuel and protect my body-ecosystem. I started to see that everything is in symbiosis.
My binary mind culturally bestowed on me initially saw this symbiosis as a transactional exchange: this for that, one individual bound to another in an arrangement that was mutually beneficial but driven by self-interest. I find this an interesting reflection: I assumed – undoubtedly, as many others did/do – that this is how the world works. This for that: a convenient agreement that meets one’s own needs.
Slowly, my ecological mind opened up to observe – in a figurative sense – the intricate and unfathomable complexity of life. This was something extremely humbling. I zoomed out. A new perspective came into view. The linear, binary and simple this-for-that exchanges morphed into dynamic and complex living systems. I learnt that complexity only gets more complex the more we think we understand. The frontier of knowledge is ever moving, not because we are closer to the “truth” but because we are following the fractals of understanding deeper and deeper, wider and wider, and this is altering our realities. (I caution my use of “we” and “our” here).
I recently read about the idea of entanglement as origin – that all complex beings are the product of “endosymbiosis”, which posits, as I understand it, that the species divide is an illusion and all species evolved because of one another, not because of the bonds between one being to another, but because all evolutionary adaptions are because of the smallest of beings merging and melding within others. This theory fells the so-called evolutionary tree – the story of fragmented ancestral lines of beings’ becoming.
This dissolution of the species divide can be mind-boggling, probably more so for those who have been schooled under Western philosophy and Western science – like me. Because many people understand themselves as individuals. Because agency and autonomy is coveted. Because relationality is often missed.
I contemplate the role of perception. Through our senses, we perceive the edges of things, of beings. We feel the edges. This assures us of the divides – of where the separations between this and that fall. I wonder how we would perceive the world if we had other or different senses, like those that sense the electromagnetic fields or those that sense light or smell differently, or if we had senses that we don’t even know exist (yet). Would we then perceive definite edges to things? Would our sense of self and the world be entirely different? (These sorts of questions occupy me a lot at the moment as I contemplate how humans fabricate realities – this theme will probably pop up throughout my Substacks).
Of course, our senses combined with technologies enable us to now perceive our body-ecosystems in new ways – through microscopic lenses and cameras and the like. Reality has shifted. Interestingly, our imaginations somehow team up with technology and perception to take us on journeys into unseen realms of our own bodies.
I wonder what ecological (rather than only biological) knowledge we may bring to our body-ecosystems. When I try to detangle myself from anthropocentric, colonial and degenerative beliefs about the world, I’m forced to ask different questions about how I relate to what’s happening to me (I actually edited this from “my body” to “me” – it seems I continue to fall into the trap of disassociating the two), what it means and what it represents. And also how I relate to healing.
If I were to bring a systemic lens to it, I’d view my body-ecosystem as having been disrupted in ways that create new systemic behaviours and potentially have launched the ecosystem into a degenerative state – a spiralling downturn where less life is conducive to less life (the opposite is true of regeneration: life is conducive to life, making living systems more resilient over time). I’m not sure what the disruption was – though I do have a few guesses. No matter, the ecosystem has changed.
So what am I to do? Am I trying to change it back? Is that what it means to heal? I don’t think so. I don’t think there is any going back. Is there?
We recognise “out in the world” that some ecosystems are sensitive to change. Certain conditions and qualities make it so. Maybe I’m sensitive to change too. Maybe I must move with change rather than fight it. Of course, if I’m in a degenerating downward spiral, where less life is conducive to less life, I probably should intervene before my body-ecosystem loses more resilience and I get progressively sicker until… well, I guess until I am no more.
This thought reminds me of the work of Sophie Strand. I first encountered her only a few months ago on Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance with Mountains course-festival. She posits, “What does it mean to become soil … we need generous bodies ready to rot”. She reminds us, “Be ready to compost”.
She puts forward that death is transcending from the singular to the plural. “We are always on our way to being something else,” she says. Thinking like this, she says, allows us to melt into a more-than-human mind.
I find her words delicious. Though, we may already think of ourselves in the plural. But she is right; knowing ourselves as matter that will become soil can help dissolve the boundaries between us and the others. This goes back to the topic of perception. It also goes back to increasing levels of complexity the harder we look. And now I’m thinking that “body-ecosystem” is too simplistic. What if we thought of ourselves as body-biomes, comprised of many interconnected ecosystems, that share a containing set of conditions (our body), but have diverse and unique cultures of beings throughout.
Just to disappear into the abstract even further, I enjoy that I used the word “cultures” above and am now pondering on the relationships between these communities of microbes and their places (my body systems). As far as we know, these micro-beings don’t exhibit cultural traits in the same ways as humans, but they do indeed exhibit cultural traits – traits that arise through the relationships between them. What are these traits? Do they exist intangibly like many of our human cultural traits, like spirituality, for example?
If we – our bodies – are biomes, could we consider the spaces between our bodies as ecotones – the places where biomes gradually fade into one another? I just tapped “ecotones” into ChatGPT, and this is what it spat out: “Ecotones are important ecologically because they often support unique species assemblages and ecological processes that are not found in either adjacent biome. They can also serve as corridors for species migration and gene flow between different ecosystems.”
Two things struck me: unique assemblages, and corridors of species migration. The latter landed more concretely because we already know this to be true with the spread of contagious illnesses, like colds and flus. Who else is on the move, migrating between biomes? Do they follow seasonal patterns like the wildebeest, caribou, and migratory birds? Do they follow lifecycles like the salmon? When we hang out with our families, friends or any group, do their microbes migrate? Do our beings meld at a microbial level? What about when we spend time in forests, by the sea, or anywhere really – do we merge microbially into those places?
I’ll return to the central topic. I won’t “win” if I attempt to dominate the body-biome. My suffering could be the growing pains of a system evolving. It could also indicate that the system isn’t in optimal health, i.e. not in a regenerative state. No matter, I will work with the beings in the system as best I can, trying not to collapse into binaries of good and bad, and also noting that what disrupted/is disrupting the system may exist beyond the physical, because mind and body are one (re-member). With this, I hope that my relational healing – with all actors in and beyond my body-biome – will be conducive to moving through the suffering toward a calmer state without the over-flux (with balance, though I didn’t really want to use that word).
Circling back, we may be in awe of the world – of our complex body-biomes – without being ecstatic. And maybe such reverence may be conducive to healing. Healing, like all things, is relational, between us and other humans, between us and the world around us, between us and the beings we ingest (food), and between us and all who make us us.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world and sources of inspiration). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
Recommendation
I need to think of a better name for this segment. But each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world.
Ways of Being by James Bridle
I first listened to this as an audiobook last year, but there are just some books that you want to read. This book does an incredible job of asking the reader to take a step back and challenge the assumptions and learnt beliefs that shape how they understand and engage with the world. It’s not a heavy read, yet it includes many important topics skillfully woven together. Fundamentally, it’s a book about ecology – how everything is interconnected. Through an ecological examination of how the world works, Bridle interrogates how humans may relate to machines and computational systems as we move into a new age of technology. Read more.
Loved this. What an interesting and beautiful way to look at our ecosystem, within and around 'us'. May you find healing through evolving dear x