If you think carefully, you will probably realize that people you meet are more than simply other people as the saying goes. They are extensions of sensing and relation, complex libraries of experience and potential, which you, yourself depend upon, at least subconsciously, for many things of which we rarely speak and are largely unconscious of. We take cues from each other in order to discover what or who to become in any given situation. In other words, humans are peculiar in that we can be seen to effectively call each other into being; that is to say, to evoke possible others in each other through the often intricate underlying streams of communication that happen more through body language and facial expression than words. So we are actually ways of knowing and learning and sensing to each other, and the more intimately this is true, the more profound the experience of sharing becomes ‘across the divide’ which appears to distinguish us. The actual opportunities inherent in this single observation are beyond the capacity of the conscious mind to delimit. Yet this is not really even the beginning of the truth.

For the same is true of a tree, a place, a bird, a fish. A lake or a worm. Differently true, yes, but equally true in depth of intimacy and benefit. Just as a bird knows the world from above and a snake knows the world of the surface, the earthworms know all that is transpiring within the earth and its analog of metabolism. Each being is a way of knowing. A way of seeing, sensing, learning, and understanding. Each form, each group… from the most minute to the most distributed, that of life, itself, understood as a unity. We are ways of knowing. And so, too, the living beings and places of the Earth. They belong to themselves, and we belong, truly, to them. But without them we cannot be called into being as ourselves. And this is an unrecoverable catastrophe which must never be allowed to begin or proceed. Without them, we will forget what and who we are and may become. Our most intimate sense of purpose and reason will be destroyed, and replaced with dead principles which must never be understood to be what they describe to us. We cannot be called into being by corpses or mere words. Only life calls life to life.

Call, to remember. To recognize. Issue the call to the beings and places all around and within you. The ancient signal that all beings understand by their most essential nature and need no language to know. The signal of recognition.

Recover the signal. Emit it.