deep value in tiny connections

I recently had reason to revisit these images and the short accompanying post from Laura Meredith.

At the end of the post, she says “When faced with the complexity of soil, it is easy to feel paralyzed”.

In the past, I’ve worked on many projects that have approached a problem or a curiosity so huge, it’s been necessary to pull apart the spatial (and temporal) order of things. It’s much easier to examine a single component of a greater system. The issue then becomes, how does that single component fit back in to the greater picture? And how does it interact with all the other single components? Truly, you could spend your whole life studying a gram of soil, and you’d never run out of things to discover.

The examination of a single component of a greater system is a very authentic connection to the greater world around us.

A few days ago, I woke up on a weekend morning knowing that I had planned to go to work that day: there’s always tons to do, weekend or not. However, I’m very lucky, and for the most part I can coordinate my work schedule as I go along. This is very important to me, as, depending on the state of my brain when I wake up, it sometimes takes me serious effort to wake up and leave the house.

On that day, I was feeling well enough – but I didn’t want to go to work, I wanted to go and hang out with some horses. I was just going to go and be with them, not ride, just go and be with them. On this morning, being with those friends was my only task for the day. As is usual, I ended up becoming far more involved with the goings on of the barn and it turned into a busy day of physical work. It was good, and it was what I needed.

Sometimes I feel a terrific sense of urgency in my day-to-day job – yeah, I need to pay bills, and all that stuff. But more often than not I’m trying to find where the service is in what I do. I know that the research I have been performing could have an impact on a large scale and the picture I’ve painted for myself is that that end goal is the only way I perform my service. The process is irrelevant, and the sooner I meet that goal the sooner I will have done what I’m ‘supposed’ to do, the sooner I will be ‘successful’. When I take a step back I can see, obviously, that this mindset is far more a product of my own self-esteem and projections than anything the universe is demanding from me.

There is deep value to these tiny connections we make – particularly when we make them mindfully, and honor them appropriately, when we observe them, fully. If we make enough of them, we begin to arrange them and form a richer understanding and perception of the entire image. While none of us will ever grasp the entire complexity of the whole network we belong to – I don’t think we’re designed for that – we may begin to accept that we have a valuable and authentic place within that network.

This, to me, is one of the inherent values of an animist’s perspective. Jesse Bering’s excellent book ‘A Very Human Ending’, examines human suicide as being a social disease, which occurs through lack of connection, isolation. I have learned through studying and living animism, that any difficulties I have in connecting to human people do not negate the many small, honored, interactions I make, daily, with non-human people.

When faced with the complexity of living life, or any other monumental task - it is easy to feel paralyzed. Humans are built, designed, to be connected to one another and to non-human variables, just as microorganisms are. It is valuable and beautiful to start small.