The medicine of entanglement

Life is entangled.

Bodies are entangled.

When we try to separate ourselves, we lose the truth.

Sure, we are human. Yet, only 47% of our cells are our own. The rest? An entanglement of other beings, creatures, entities. The folx we need to feed to stay alive.

I was at the Narrative Power Summit in New Orleans last week, and I sat at a lunch table with someone I had met on an app 4 years ago in Brooklyn. I also met a relative from my reservation – I never meet other Wind River Shoshones in the wild. The guy across from me was born down the road from where I now live in Vermont. At the head of the table was a person who introduced me to an organization I ended up doing a storytelling partnership with two years ago. We’d never met, only emailed.

Entangled, all of us.

There is a seduction to siloing. Making sense of. Clear lines. Binaries. Someone to blame. We must resist this siren song, and instead find pleasure in the allure of interconnectedness.

Oh, you don’t need anyone? You’re self-sufficient? Well then, might I ask who picked your food and wove your clothes? You’ve never gone to a bodega at 2:16? Someone caught you when you were born. Someone else cut the chord and composed that song you love. Odds are, if you are reading this, you didn’t build the phone in your hand or the roof over your head. Who have you been entangled with since you opened your eyes this morning?

Let us be seduced by the mess of it all. The unanswerableness. Stickier than toddlers hands we are and forever shall be.

When we breathe we breathe in mycelium and bacteria and dust from the roads.

When we break bread we kiss the cook, the farmer, the woodworker, the pollinator, the fire keeper.

This is a mess we can’t tidy up. We are woven into it. So let us love this mess. Bless this mess. Bow to its great mystery. Let this mess embolden us to revel in “I don’t know.”

Let us see it for what it is: billions of years of remixes and brilliance that somehow resulted in us.