…is one. Everything is connected. If you don’t see it you’re just too close to the picture. All of you reading now have a heartbeat, and blood which carries around hemoglobin with a smaller molecule consisting of iron in its core. You need iron since it binds oxygen.

So what does iron have to do with being connected to everything? Well as a true renaissance man of today, Tom Chi states in the story of blood, breath and mind, that there was no iron when the universe was born. Without iron there would be no you. Where did the iron come from? From forceful drama of truly cosmic proportions – collisions, formation and deaths of stars. There is a strong gravitational pull galaxies exert on each other creating the supercluster of a hundred thousand galaxies Laniakea which, translated from Hawaiian, means “immeasurable heaven”. If there were no violent collisions there would be no heavier elements aka iron to carry oxygen sustaining human life.

We’re grandiose in our humanness, exploiting every other species of plant and animal to our advantage when thank you is in order. A few billion years ago the breath we now take for granted was impossible on this planet. The atmosphere was unbreathable and the only things that could be were one celled organisms. A couple of billion years ago a bacteria thrived, took the sunlight and then abundant CO2 and started producing oxygen. Photosynthesis sparked by a single organism, over billions of years, produced enough oxygen for the ozone layer to form. Without it no complex multicellular life couldn’t exist. Small things working together over a period of time can change history. The initial bacteria is now assimilated by plants and exist as chloroplasts in the leafs. Plant life and our own is mirrored – our exhale provides their inhale and vice versa. No plants literally means no air for us. This one cell bacteria didn’t set out to put a whole evolutionary tree in motion. It just did what it was good at, it survived and thrived in an unhospitable environment and, fighting for its own existence, enabled our own. We as humans are connected to each individual here past, present or future, be it building on what was built beforehand when we got here, abiding to the same life force with those alive now, or to the future which relies on our collective contributions for it to plot its course. You can affect your community, which affects the larger society, which then translates into new laws and courses of action that benefit and not harm the biome, which transforms the planet as a whole. If you for example decide to use only recyclable products, you might entice your family and friends to do so as well and they will inspire theirs and the circle spreads to the braking point where it’s more profitable for businesses to produce recyclable items since the majority of the market is gravitating towards them.

There are no insignificant things. It may just take some time for them to cut through the noise. What affects one, affects us all, everything is connected as all of the great spiritual traditions have been speaking of this for millennia. We just got to busy bragging to listen for a while. Abide by your conscience, understand the connection, the world needs more of that.