22 23 What this reality is about is what I want to look at in this essay. I will try to sketch the coarse outline of an Ecology of Being that remains in touch with the heart and still draws on the findings of scientific ecology and physiology. In this Ecology of Being there is only one reality, and it is filled with only one desire: the longing to distribute the gift of life. Being is profoundly sharing. It means sharing what grants life. From this standpoint, a flower’s blossom is as close as it gets if we want to directly look at the eyes of the heart. Every act of life, every process by which an organism builds up its body – breathing, digesting, excreting, among many more – at the same time passes on gifts of life to other bodies. Being myself allows others to be themselves, too. This simple observation has become very much veiled because the idea that life is mainly competition – the opposite of sharing – has distorted our vision so tragically. But before any struggle for scarce resources can take place in the first place, life is already fundamentally shared. And how could it not be, since all that there is, is fundamentally one, one single pool of matter, the waters of reality? The insignificant pleasure at the river bank that my little dog indulged in, during the last days of her life, opened a door into a profound mystery. With one gesture, she simultaneously was drinking, she was standing inside of what she took in, and, because living beings predominantly consist of water, she was also what she gobbled up with her tongue. She was in the little brook, and she stood there as the little brook. The next time she would pee, she would let the brook flow on. With every exhalation, breathing out invisible water vapour, she would add it to the coming rain. She was part of the watershed, as the brook itself was. She showed me that the water cycle circles through us – or rather, it revolves flowing as us. We are not just a container for the flow of life. Each one is the spring itself. No wonder that many humans are so deeply attracted to bodies of water, finding rest and peace at their banks, feeling that the brook knows all my secrets, as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard² put it. The flowing water knows our secrets, because it is us. We are the river. And since we are the river, we act like the river: we pass water to other beings. Exhalation creates vapour that condenses into rain which ultimately forms rivers. Excretion fertilises plants, which, in turn, growing into dense stands, create clouds that water the earth. Living beings do this job by just being themselves. By standing in a little brook, halfoblivious to themselves, and swallowing the smooth and soothing fluid that is the water’s body. The simple act of being provides nourishment for more being. We might even say that the simple process of being already is a fundamental act of love. For what is love other than the action of providing life to someone? Allowing life through one’s actions, and intentions? In this way, my dog was a source of life, and simultaneously she received life from this source. She was gifted life from the spring, bathing her feet, and she was that spring in turn. There was something timeless about that scene, one organism of water immersed in another being of water. Observe this well, this is how it really is, a little voice inside me spoke as I sat by the brook. And this is how it will be, when she will be gone; when she will no longer be an individual manifestation of life, but rather the nameless waters that are everywhere, and everything. It was sad, and sweet, and soothing to see. It is not only through our existence as water, however, that we can understand that being alive means to be comprised in an ongoing act of giving life. Not only are organisms held together as one huge watershed, they are also a single unseparated body. The flesh of this single, endless body flows in and out, forming individual beings through waves of ingestion and breath. No living body remains itself for even the shortest instant. It breaks down continuously and is supplanted by matter ingested from other bodies. A living being’s individuality is nothing constant. It can be compared to a wave crest in a stormy ocean. What the wave truly is, when it has dispersed after a long, agitated journey across the sea, is water. What the wave ultimately experiences itself as, after the stormy crossing is over, is water, is the whole. We disperse ourselves into other beings with every exhalation. While we breathe out, we distribute the flesh of our body into the air. We exhale CO ² . The capital C in this, the carbon in the carbon dioxide, is the carbon that just a moment before was our individual body. It made up the proteins of our muscles, the fat under our skin, the sugar in our blood. We all have learned in school that we eat food, burn it, use the energy contained within it and eject the remains. But this image is rather wrong. We don’t shed used-up consumer waste. We exhale our body, so that the plants can inhale it, eat it and build their flesh from ours. And in turn, we animals eat plants, or other animals that have eaten plants, and create our bodies from theirs. There are no separate bodies. There is only one huge ocean of shared matter. In this ocean, what is truly at the base is the reciprocal offering of the gift of life. I feed the plants. The plants feed me. I cannot help doing so. I cannot help being fed. I cannot help that the gift of life is given. I cannot help that love is provided. I can only pretend that it is otherwise, to my own and to all of life’s detriment. All this allows us to understand ecological relations not as the gloom of predation and violent death, but as the bliss of giving and receiving gifts. The miracle of this world is that it is edible, and we are so, too. By being edible, reality proves that it is one. If this world is edible, we will always be fed. How could we not be fed when there is nothing but nourishment? When everything is made of our flesh? I imagine that some readers will object though. Isn’t being edible rather something terrible, a proof that we are unwelcome, that we are not held, but annihilated? Of course there is death, and there is suffering before it, and besides it. There is an incredible amount of suffering among the individuals which manifest themselves as this one spring of life. It would be entirely irresponsible to push this fact away, to deny its existential truth (as in the attitude that death is an illusion). Suffering is real, and we – the civilization relying on technology and scientific thinking – are absolutely making it worse because we are fixated on the individual body, and not on what it does, namely the action of providing life to others. We miss to see that the deepest reality of a living individual is not its individual flesh, but the deed through which we create life with every breath, and create ourselves with it, and create others in this process. We see the individual body, and its intricate workings, and think that this is how life is built. We must then believe that with the end of this individual body, life is over. We must think that the experience of life is firmly tied to that body, that the body produces it as a function of its workings. When these stop, life must be gone. This would indeed be terrible. All of life would be an unfair joke, or as the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus had it, an absurd challenge which can only make you despair. For the young Camus, the only meaningful philosophical question was whether to commit suicide in the face of this absurdity. Camus did not, although he never changed his view. Most other humans tend to fill the void left by the distorted view that our separateness is the word by, so to speak, having fun, buying things and taking trips, before it is over. They care for themselves, turning away from the foundational reality of their breath, of their liquid, life-providing nature. They have learned to take and not to give, to push away as long as they can the seemingly inevitable fate that they will vanish into nothing. ²Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, ed. Corti, Paris, 1942: «The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring».
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