Consanguine

Let’s say you have a field. This field has a lot of grasses in it. Every blade of grass is slightly different in texture, color, shape, size, smell, and taste. There are also a lot of herbs in this field. Some are flowering, some are dead, some are low, and some are high. There are sparrows, blackbirds, wrens, and a hawk here. Shrews, woodchucks, mice, and rabbits dig up soil that is inhabited by millions of ants, beetles, mites, spiders, nematodes, earthworms, centipedes, and microscopic single-celled creatures. A big furry beast with sharp teeth was seen feasting on what once had antlers and hooves. This is a mind-boggling assortment of cells, proteins, molecules, atoms, electrons. This is a field.

Language is the abstraction of reality into discrete “things” represented by words. As humans we have abstracted our existence to oblivion. Only in rare moments do we perceive the world without our language filter lens. It is these times of great clarity or emotion that our mind chatter turns off and we purely experience our surroundings without abstract interpretation.

Existence is messy. Everything is connected to everything else. We use fertilization to draw the line between living organisms but do your sex cells belong to you or your offspring? We all begin as a single cell with the information necessary to multiply into these complex trillion-celled structures. If you trace your lineage back there is no clear dividing line between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, no line between our common ancestor with chimpanzees or our common ancestor with plants because every living being has come from another living being since the first organic molecules began to replicate and organize nearly 4 billion years ago. Species, populations, and individuals are artifacts of our arbitrary decisions of where the lines are drawn. The lines bleed. There are no divisions, no walls.