Noah Ryan, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard's interest in the very small is something I don't see very often. She reminds us of the millions of little worlds that play out their stories all around us at all times. The vast multitudes of smaller life make life like ours possible, they fill out a huge food web, effecting and even inhabiting us. The idea of being the host to thousands of being is one that I try to remind myself of occasionally. The idea of personal separation in Western thought (which is the system of thought that, ironically, discovered that these beings exist) and the obsession with purity in things helps us forget that we are indeed the home of many bacteria and microbial beings. The mind body problem seems like a absurd joke when I think about how much the neurons in my brain benefit from the bacteria in my stomach. They eat us and help us live. This is a sort of connectedness to the world that is easy to forget (microscopic things tend to be). While it brings up a lot of questions about what the "I" is and all that, but what I want to say is that we are intimately connected to the world every minute of every day, even in when we separate ourselves in our houses (inhabited by spiders and ants and beetles and many other things) we are still connected to thousands of lives. We carry the reality of inhabited places everywhere we go, inside of us. I find myself wanting to eat yogurt, just to add some more little beings, to be that much more an inhabited place (A being can be a (sacred) place!).
I'm just glad to be part of it all.