The question I am sitting with in this end of the year is: If I no longer believe in what I was taught to believe (the duality of heaven and earth, the afterlife as a separate realm of eternity, the linearity of time, that all spiritual and mystic traditions outside of Christianity are bad or evil, the idea of sin, the original Eden, the final judgment) than what do I believe? Or, to put it in my therapist’s language, what do I know that I know. The one thing that I intuitively strongly know is the idea of inseparability. It is more than interconnection – separate beings can be connected in many ways. Inseparability is about not being able to draw a clear border where the others end and I begin. Yesterday, I was looking at the map of Earth with my children, where the five oceans were numbered. I said, do you notice anything? My son said, it’s imperfect. I believe he was referring to the jagged contours and strange shapes of the continents. I envy him, envy his privilege to be seeing things for the first time and having no answers, only questions. I said, look at the oceans, where does one end and the other begin? It’s all one ocean. We all come from this ocean through the long line of ancestors of all shapes, forms and abilities. We’ve adapted to life on land with its bizarre contours, we’ve adapted so well that we decided to draw more contours, more straight and jagged lines: city limits, roads, railways, borders. We even drew lines in the ocean to separate it to manageable proportions. But they are what they are – just lines. They are illusionary. 

Why do we teach our children that there are five oceans? The turtle knows there is just one and only ocean. So do salmon, so do migratory birds. I believe that our fundamental ancestral knowledge, the one we share with all creatures, including those who can fly, swim, grow roots, eat light and digest Earth’s minerals turning them into growth and weather, is that we are inseparable. In a great, magnificent but also simple and intuitive way we are all one. This knowledge is the mother of all our senses. It guides the turtles and migratory birds alongside magnetic lines from one place to another. It guides seeds towards the light and hyphae towards the plant roots. We, humans, may be the only ones wandering and poking randomly in all directions.