Interdividuals
this article is from the “Words Matter” series, which explores y(our) relationship to words and language
Ubuntu (Zulu, umuntu, ngumuntu, ngabantu) = ‘ I am because we are’ also ‘I am because you are’
(Xhosa) = the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity
Somebody somewhere close to my desert neighborhood drove into a utility pole. Tall timber face-planted in the sand. Lights died. People sweat. Workers revived the power lines but our A/C was injured. Current returned minus the cool. We called an electrician who summoned employees too hot to respond so he came instead. A new breaker later, comfort restored, he left heftily remunerated for his emergency service and dispersed some of the funds at a motorcycle store, his newly acquired currency forging fresh currents of commerce. The shop owner was enriched and stopped at a restaurant on the way home to bring dinner to his wife and kids.
One person’s lapsed synapse rippled through many households. Crashing into the pole, the driver collided into unseen lives and livelihoods, impacting them via our collective vicinity to infinity, the infinite invisible web of connection that in all ways unites us.
We all affect the All.
To call ourselves independent misses our interdependence. No matter how much value has been placed on devaluing connection, no one exists in isolation. Each of us has an energetic echo.
Still, we are taught to pride ourselves on ‘rugged individualism,’ a myth riddled with schisms about the truth of the human condition. We learn to favor a foundation built on a rocky outcropping of selective shards that defy our human heritage. We love when someone defies the odds, which are oddly stacked against collaboration and the collective help it takes to make a self.
In our chosen lore, rather than revere Life-giving women, our culture seems to admire the flamboyant fib of ‘self-made,’ a corrosively contagious oxymoron.
No one births themselves!
It makes bio and logical sense that we are marinated in dependence from the moment of conception; we start out with ten months of curation and arrive with no plan of our own, sown by grace and divine momentum.
Nobody rides free of others. We grow by the grace of other people’s bodies and labor. And Nature. None of us can make water. Someone else gets our food, changes our diapers, manufactures the mats or mattresses we sleep on, and procures the components that comprise them. If we pull ourselves up from the bootstraps, it’s because somebody else made them, or an animal provided the raw material for the lift. Even self-help books have authors!
Individual is a misnomer, a noun that frowns upon what we’ve known since the dawn of time; that we are Interdividuals, Interconnected, interwoven, entwined. Inclined toward the divine. In dependence
we are tethered together by universal umbilical chords, lustrous ley lines strung across the planet taken for granted
Time to bestow what we deeply know but have overlooked since our society took root on another culture’s roots, reinventing a lore that shores up isolation and leaves us immune to communing.
We are an ad infinitum continuum of intertwined individuals
Interdividuals
who need to reclaim their frame of reference towards deference to each we we oversee without looking.
We are all Chosen by Life.
We have all been birthed by the same Mystery, the same Nature that imbues Life with form Coming from the same ether and returning to the same ever after.
Either way we choose to go it We are not alone We are gifted us.
No one has ever done it alone.