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Making Life Bigger
Carefully chosen words present themselves one after another on the screen. I notice the small, haptic vibration of each keypress. Sentences emerge, shifting disconnected words into phrases, which soon gain independence and punctuation.
Ideas begin to take hold as the individual pieces lose identity to become part of the larger whole.
This is the other, or at least another cycle of life.
We eat and consume each other for energy so we can go on until it is our turn to become food too.
But we also join together. Just as our organs work together to be an organism, those organs are a joint function of tiny organisms called cells, which have tiny little organ-like structures of their own called organelles.
From organelles to organisms to organs to humans. Us. And then we organize ourselves to make organizations. Physical bodies join together to form political bodies, economic bodies, intellectual bodies, etc.
And none of the above is what most people would call an especially fresh observation. But it’s a thought I like to roll around in my head, like a stone that fits in your hand just so, how much life depends upon cooperation. Imagining the elemental atoms that must join together to become those cells, and the near-impossibly small electrons that make up those. Or, moving in the other direction that some of those abstract bodies our physical bodies make will outlive us all, and how the “corp” in corporation comes from the Latin word for body.
Anyway, here’s a picture of a crow I took on our roof:
