Imagine you are a luscious summer berry in a carefully tended garden. After months of your plant receiving ample sunlight, consistent water from the storms, and care from a gardener who tends to you daily, pruning and protecting you from disease and creatures who want to consume you before you’re plump and ripe, your plant grows healthy and tall and strong, and your once pale color turns a deeper and deeper shade as you ripen on the vine.
One day, a small bird finds its way through a somewhat larger gap in the wire fence that shelters you. It lands on a vine above you and eats all your friends and family, and in its thrashing, you fall to the ground, alone. Not to be harvested by your beloved caretaker and turned into a delicious jam or pie, but to have half your mushing body begin to sag into the earth, while the other half of your body, the “good half,” is unevenly plucked at and consumed by a different bird, until you’re gobbled up and then piss-shatsomewhere completely strange and random.
Let’s be totally fucking real. Sometimes this is how life feels.
As someone who organizes their life around mutual aid, and practices small-scale socialism in the form of collective living and community organizing, it’s surprising to me that this is the reflection which surfaced as I meditated on interdependence.
Of course networks of care and mutual trust can feel good; I think a lot of us are painfully aware of how unfathomably inequitable, short-sightedly sociopathic, and self-and-ecologically-destructive our systems of hyper-individualism are making our collective human organism. And I think more and more people, meditators or not, are “waking up” to the basic idea that we are not apart from the world, but a part of it.
So yeah, no surprise that interdependence can feel like sweet balm in an otherwise-imbalanced world. But what we seem to forget is that interdependence isn’t something we have to try for, orchestrate or strive for. It’s something we simply can’t fall out of.
In other words, you do not have to try to be interdependent. You simply can’t not be.
Whether you think you need to rely on others or not (and if you’re reading this, I wholeheartedly assume you are not among the world’s wealthiest 1%, nor are you harboring isolationist fantasies of elite space colonization), we are all entangled in a messy, beautiful, and asymmetric web of interconnection. The wealthiest among us eat food which is grown by the most marginalized (and even if you don’t own a spacecraft, this part probably is true for you, and you probably feel rightfully incensed thinking about it). There is no falling out of the net of interdependence. It shapes us. It is us.
But you can lean into it. Like a gardener who will only ever harvest a percentage of the berries they tend to, you can cultivate interdependence in your life into something more intentional, more beautiful, more mutually supportive. Sometimes it is gonna be dirty work, unrewarding and full of conflict and requiring more trust than feels easy. Sometimes it will require you to lean into growing edges that are vulnerable and scary. And it will probably require you to learn what your boundaries are, and the indispensable necessity of communicating them, the hard way.
Moments of crisis, demonstrably, are also times that we deepen our trust and connection, and open to each other more. That’s certainly true for me. The instigating reason I live in a communal structure which pools all our income (enabling us to co-own our home – something none of us could have done independently), and dedicate my time to studying past-and-present mutual aid projects, is because I once found myself unemployed and without “independent” options for making it through. In other words, I live with conscious interdependence because the systems of zero-sum individualism failed me, as they have failed all of us.
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Reflect on the times in your life of genuine crisis, the real-hard-shit you have grown through: disaster, grief, loss, anxiety, suffering. I can all but swear the way you made it through these experiences was by relenting yourself to a network of relational care, by depending on others.
I want to be clear that the narratives of selves as self-determined individuals aren’t completely untrue; there are desires and idiosyncrasies and facets of yourself that are untouchably unique and singular. There are parts of yourself you have worked for, that you have cultivated through hard-won self-commitment. And I am someone who devotedly holds the position that individual interests and collective interest do not have to be unreconcilable aims.
But there’s more to the story than independence shows us. And those parts usually take a little more patience to really see or understand, because they require touching into perspectives that are different than our own, bigger than our own.
What is also true is we are interconnected, that we belong to each other, and that in some ways, we are each other. But we have collectively constructed a world which tends to make us forget this. This world personalizes “success” or “failure” as some moral indication of a person’s worthiness, (and therefore, their access to food, water, shelter, and companionship). If this makes you angry, that’s a good sign.
OK. Remember that you-berry that was piss-shat out of a bird’s cloaca?
Through being consumed, the seeds inside of your berry actually ended their dormancy and began to germinate in the process of being digested. Right now, they’re being deposited in a nitrogen-rich environment (of piss-shit) far away from your original plant such that your seeds do not have to compete for light, water, or soil. Those berry seeds may grow into a wild bush that feeds countless other creatures.
And even if it doesn’t, and it remains a pile of “rot” on the ground, well hey, it will have always fed that one bird. And it will always be composted back into the earth, as something valuable and serviceable and beautiful to the organism and/or ecosystem and/or organisms-as-ecosystems that are around it, in one way or another.
There’s no way to fall out of it.
You’re the shit. Literally.
*****
Resource List for Those Wanting to Lean In to Interdependence (and Inspiration for This Essay):
Dean Spade – Mutual Aid
Sarah Nahar’s concepts of defecatory and excretory justice
Joanna Macy’s reflections on dependent co- arising and mutual causality
Thích Nhất Hạnh on interbeing and the reflecting on a flower as made entirely of “non-flower” elements
Rebecca Solnit – A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
David Griffiths – Queer Theory for Lichens
Ed Yong – I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life