In fact it is not “your life” as such. You own none of it: your failures, your disappointments, your accidents, your successes, your failed attempts at mastery and your many inabilities. Even “your” thoughts are not the things in your head or products of your solitary genius. They are no one’s property. They are part of the “larger” movement of things that brings shape and form and colour to everything. The dance that precedes and proceeds, leaving eddies – you – in its wake. You are the denseness of these many movements…these unspeakably intricate gestures, these bodily signals that connect bare stone and spinning galaxy in a single sigh.
Many indigenous cosmologies speak of the world as entangled – like a spider’s web. The implications are not immediately obvious: consider however that even the flicker of an eyelid tugs on inter-generational strings and vibrates through the warp and woof of our webbed lives. At every point in “our lives”, we generate the collective, we proliferate a stunning commonwealth of touches. We remake the source. In a sense, a multitude of other lives presses suffocatingly close to us. We are lichens, and a “deeper” truth is hidden in the oft repeated aphorism, which says “it takes a village to raise a child”: the village is the child. In that small knot of many threads lies the embroidery of the whole fabric, still threadbare, never resolved, but always in the making.
