“What you do or say to one man, all men hear and know. There is no exception. Above the place where we seem to be individuals. So that each time one relates with a man, any man at all, one is relating with ‘The Man of All Men’ that all men are, have been, and shall be the face of.

So, too, with each woman. With each child. This matter is not irrational or make-believe. What one says or does with one person, all the universe witnesses. Forever. Each gesture. Each signal. Each action.

Only in language are such truths denied.

Long ago I began to become aware that a moment of relation with any woman at all… was somehow a moment of relation with all women in all of time. Then, slowly, I began to understand. May I be allowed to see even more deeply, for as yet I am still blind.

So it is with any creature. An insect, a fish. A bird. Or any plant. What we do in relation with living beings is known and seen by all living beings. Not with cameras. With timespace. Pure intelligence. So if today, I aid a bee or spider, the bees and spiders know me as their ally when we meet again. So, too, the flowers that they tend. So, too the nearby trees, and all the creatures of a place.

There is a reason why we should be cautious of evaluations and common or traditional ways of thinking about identity or humanity. Many reasons. The frameworks we have been trained to see with are like language, but not like reality or identity. We seem to be individuals. Nor is it that we are not. But rather, what this means is far more strange than language ordinarily allows us to think.

I can no longer see your bodies or faces, so, for me, this matter is simply a fact that became clearer as my sight faded into night. You come to me in constellations, I hear four voices tell me the same story in an afternoon, yet these know not one another. We are all in the places between us.

I hear your voice, and the spirits of your heart and mind emerge to me in its music. I can certainly tell you apart. But I am never convinced this apartness is, or ever was or could be… in any way more true than something more beautiful… or that it could be explicit.”

— Apopholaeus, the Blind