When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

-- John Muir

Clouds gather overhead, conferring about how soon to release their moisture. The slow, steady rain builds in crescendo. Winds blow. Temperatures drop. Snow accumulates. Months pass and frozen elements melt, trickling toward the river, flowing out to sea, eventually evaporating to rejoin the cloud committee and the hydrological cycle continues its ancient dance as it has for millions of years.

The same water the trilobites drank circulates within our own bodies. Henry David Thoreau understood this when he wrote:

I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug...and our buckets, as it were, grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

And those same damp winds join my wet breath and mix with exhaled moisture from aspen trees, sea otters, blue herons, and ravens. The breath of a seagull picking dead skin off the back of a sunburned whale mingles with air blown from the lungs of elephants, an artist installing an exhibition, a spice seller on the street in Delhi, and an astronomer calculating the size of galaxy D20970.

Many scientists have understood that connections are an integral part of their life and research. Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., a theoretical high-energy physicist, explains that:

The basic oneness of the universe is not only the central characteristic of the mystical experience, but is also one of the most important revelations of modern physics...As we study the various models of subatomic physics we shall see that they express again and again, in different ways, the same insight -- that the constituents of matter and the basic phenomena involving them are all interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent; that they cannot be understood as isolated entities, but only as integrated parts of the whole.

BASIA IRLAND

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than a journey-work of the stars!

-- Walt Whitman