sonora2sonoma

The air upon which we, along with all other living beings, depend for our survival unites us all in our common oneness with all the earth’s creatures and serves as a reminder to those aware that with each breath we take in, we demonstrate that we’re all brothers and sisters joined in a common web of biodiversity of which each one of us is but a piece. As John Donne, the 17th Century metaphysical poet, reminds us, “no man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

The next line of Donne’s poem goes “if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”

The belief that we are each separate beings, in possession of our own agency to act, is illusion, nothing more. Despite what we’ve been taught to the contrary, that which befalls the least among us, be it good fortune or bad, befalls the whole of us.

That is the true meaning behind the idea of shared humanity: Mother Theresa knew this, Mahatma Gandhi knew it and Jesus Christ knew it too, as have all the mystics, sages and spiritual leaders down through the ages.

And, somewhere, hidden deep within everyone’s ‘heart of hearts,’ each of us knows it too. The principal task of every person alive, with the short time we’re allotted on this troubled sphere, is to part back the veils of forgetfulness to once again reveal that which we’ve always known—that no point exists, physical or otherwise, where “I” end and “you” begin, and that, in our shared destiny, the actions of one affect the destinies of all.

Tim Konrad