Timeline photos

Timeline photos

Every Person is A Community

The idea, the concept, implicit in English and some other languages, that a person is »separate is a fiction.

Now, the language is tricky here, because what matters isn’t precisely the situation we perceive, but »how we are in that situation. In simpler terms, where and why we impose »boundaries. For what purposes. In which dimensions…

But no one was ‘themselves’, alone. They are the »instance of innumerable communities, not a mere distinct offshoot. Our minds are born communally, so too our languages, beliefs, ideas, roles… jobs… families. Our origins are, moment-to-moment… communal. Fundamentally.

But the boundaries implicit in many of our languages, pretend something else is true. The idea of ‘an individual’ while not trivial, is, most often, a strange sort of legal or linguistic fiction. It’s an economic fiction in false societies where cash rules everything. The result of non-sharing. That’s where the idea of ‘a separate person’ meets the road: money.

Even someone totally isolated… will relate with communality through memory, imagination, or representations. In the later case, the TV, or beer, or video game or porn, or heroin, etc… becomes the filter through and into which, communality and relation… are being abstracted. But it’s still the ache for belonging that funds our investment in such abstractions.

We are »seperable. And we can draw the lines in such a way that our ‘individuality’ — separateness or uniqueness — powers or injuries … are highlighted.

But, again, fundamentally, each one of us is the instance of innumerable communities. A sort of ‘local point of presence, sensing, and relation’ for and »of them.

Tonight I saw the Snow Geese, the white-cheeks, in the garden at sunset. Suddenly, about half the 50 or so ‘separate’ animals… stopped grazing. They stood, together, necks extended, testing the air, gazing northwest, sharing information for a few minutes. Synchronizing. Sensing. Sharing. And then they began the flight call. And half of them, flapping and calling, leapt together, as a single wing, that looked itself like a giant »bird… into the sky.

The others watched, and grazed. But were not separate animals. Nor were the groups separate. Except if we draw the lines that way, for purposes we generally neither notice nor admit. They seem to us intuitive. To thing of beings as separate ‘ones’. And it isn’t that they aren’t, but rather that, more essentially, they are instances… of communion. Alive. Together. For each other.