When we human creatures touch hands, we do not meet. Instead, the atoms in our hands repel each other and create invisible barriers that stop us from directly connecting. The force of this repulsion causes our skin to compress ever so slightly, and our brain interprets this as pressure, texture, and temperature.
We feel that we are meeting, but we are not. Yet, how intimate is the meeting.
Every day we human creatures travel here to there, there to somewhere else. What travels is not a singularity, a completion, but an estimated 39 trillion microbial cells within and without, bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and single-celled eukaryotes. As we travel, we shed skin cells and hair strands and sweat and sebum, a constant, exuberant meeting: DNA and bed, DNA and street, DNA and train, DNA and soil, DNA and forest, DNA and this Earth.
We may feel distinct, complete, but we are not. Instead, we are a multitude of meetings.
Humans build hedgehog highways so they can more safely move through their human-adjusted environments and better mate. Darwin wasps inject their eggs into captured hosts to reproduce and feed the young. The Crochet Coral Reef project weaves crafters and artists and scientists and mathematicians and plastics and newspaper into amalgamations of ocean and human. The discarded offcuts in the wood yard that are carefully arranged by W into our daily-utilised dining table are a generous entanglement of soil and sun and rain and season and seed made many trees, then made a discarding, then made a table.
Multispecies co-creations. Entanglements that do not defy individuation but root it.
Where do we meet? I find only fluid borders and blurred edges.
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