I was thinking about the labels we put on things and how this really limits knowing something deeply. There are studies showing that when children are learning to draw, that once they are shown how to draw something, they stop looking at the thing itself. It becomes known and reduced to what was shown to them. We limit our experience of something by the information we place upon it, creating a barrier to it. A distance, an invisible separation.

We are taught to understand the world around us through labels, symbols and categories, which makes it easier for us to navigate our way through life, creating shortcuts so we can make fast assumptions and react quickly. It has served us well for survival and all of our intellectual endeavours. However it has also created a separation to the thing itself and our knowledge has become limited and confined to the box of what we think we know.

So I consider a beautiful tree.

To try to comprehend the tree without barriers of reductive labels & symbols, I imagine I am tree. I feel myself growing from a small seed, reaching into the damp soil, gently making symbiotic connections with the microbes and fungi. Feeling always deeper, always stretching outwards, always reaching upwards to the sky. Loving the sun as I am nourished and energised. Loving the feeling of my leaves swaying in the breeze.

I am connected to everything. I breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. The birds, insects and animals use me for shelter and food. I take in water and send it to the clouds to create rain. How can I be separate to anything?

I am connected to other trees through the wood wide web of mycelium networks. I don’t have a brain, yet I communicate with other trees. I produce flowers and more seeds to become more trees. It is ongoing. How am I separate from the seed I produce, from the new life sprouting?

How am I separate from all the things I touch and connect to? From the air I breathe in, connecting me in breath to the tree who created the oxygen? From the microbes and other living organisms within and without my body? From the rainwater I take into my body as it transpires out by the tree, to be stored in my cells and organs and excreted out again, thereby collapsing any notion of inner and outer? How am I separate from anything else when everything can be traced back to a connection to me?

I think of the beginning of my human life.

A sperm and ovum coming together, cells dividing with miraculous precision to create a living breathing human. Yet before that I was an egg in my young mother, and she was an egg in my grandmother and so on. The same as the sperm in my father, grandfather and on it goes. How can I separate myself from any of my ancestors?

On and on it goes.

I trace it back to the beginning of the first human. How can any of us humans really be separate when we have the same beginning?

I trace it back further to the first life on this planet. The first single celled organism. How did I get to here from there?

Because I wanted to…

I wanted to divide, evolve, discover.

I wanted to love.

I wanted to swim and move in the water, to breathe and so I created gills. I wanted to see and so eyes evolved. I wanted to taste and teeth evolved. I wanted to touch the bottom of the river and limbs evolved. I wanted to move on land and so I did. I evolved all of my senses to explore this beautiful planet, to survive, connect, learn and to love, because I wanted to.

So how am I separate from anything when I can trace my origins to the very start of all life?

Separation is an illusion on a physical level, but what about the I that wanted to evolve?

I the consciousness, wanting, desiring, expressing, connecting ongoing. Forever moving outwards and evolving to greater understanding, awareness and love.

Separation is an illusion and so to is death.

How can it be any other way?