“You’ve been looking in the wrong direction ,” they said.

​

“You seek belonging outside of yourself. You seek it in finding, not in drifting. In arriving, not in becoming. Can you envision belonging without separation? Do not confine your selfness. Expand your selfness."

 

How? they asked.

 

“You must return to the beginning. To the waters of the womb. To the moment you first dropped into the womb as a single cell. To the journey you took aboard Noah’s Ark. To the first prokaryotic cell in the water, that primordial mitochondrial miracle, to the primal waters, the cosmic ocean."

 

How can I remember? they asked.

 

"You must watch a dried apricot pit and see in its grooves the echo of your own cells. You must imagine the cord cut from your navel tied to the root of a tree. You must wet yourself with spoiled milk, train your decaying body for death. Only then will you remember that you are not a separate being. You’ll watch dust drift where sunlight hits, and wonder how many worlds viruses must have seen as they traveled from organism to organism. You’ll imagine the ancestor of every cell, draw shapeless forms in your mind. And then—whether you want to or not—you will see the world as a single cell. You will no longer be able to separate inside from outside.”