The Connectedness of All Things

I've found that my morning walks with Sadie (my elderly golden retriever) are excellent times for meditation. I am fortunate to live in an area with lots of trees, grass, and flowers—nature as natural as it can be in a manicured suburban neighborhood.

Today it came very clearly to me how alike the trees, the grass, the dogs, and the humans are. We are all products of the happenstance of the emergence of DNA from the primordial slime. If not for that occurrence, there would be only dirt and rocks and water on this planet. While we are kindred to the earth as much as we are to each other—everything coming from “stardust” as it has—we do tend to feel a special kinship with other living beings.

All living beings here on this rock we call Earth have a common ancestry, something often visualized as the trunk of a tree. From the first spark of life, biology did what it does and adapted to various stimuli and circumstances to branch out in many directions with varying degrees of success, a process that continues to this day.1

And so it just struck me today how alike we are to the grass and the trees, how closely linked we are to the dogs and the cats, and of course how not different we are to every other human being. Human beings are just one accidental expression of the universe’s diversity. We have not always been here, and we will not always be here. We should be supporting each other, celebrating our similarities, and savoring the opportunity to share this time together.

We all breathe in the air of this planet, afforded to us by billions of years of starstuff in the form of oxygen-producing organisms emitting just the right amount of oxygen to mix with the nitrogen, etc., that we have adapted to breathing. Everyone and everything that exists does so because the universe wills it. What we do with our time here as we breathe this air and exist side by side with all other things, living and non-living, dictates the degree of peace or suffering that we all must accept.

I find myself on my morning walks thinking of these things sometimes; other times I merely allow the sensory input from the birds, the wind, the lawn mowers, the cars, the other people, and the sun on my skin and the trees and the gardens and the pavement to wash over me and meld together into an experience of just being. I think this quote from The Buddha speaks to all of us as we try to find our way to Nothingness: