A Note to Humanity: Reflections on the Illusion of Isolation

The Essence of Connection and Belonging

Isolation is an illusion.

Daisies are my heartflower. My symbol for wildness and resilience. The plant-world version of my own spirit. I look for their rebelliousness everywhere. I took this photo a year ago in June along the little trail near my home, in the middle of a rainstorm that felt as if it were created by the dark and heavy clouds in my own heart. Captured in black and white, because sometimes the world is just too vibrant to really see the heart of the thing at hand. Black and white pares a being down to its essence. Like poetry. Like stillness. Like breath.

Like grief.

A Moment of Interconnectedness

What I know is that as I watched this daisy through the lens of black and white, as I knelt in front of her with my camera, she knew she was being observed. She knew. And it occurred to me in that moment that what felt like an aching aloneness and an indescribable solitary longing was really a moment of interconnection.¹

It was a hidden togetherness making itself known. I perceived the daisy, and the daisy perceived me back. This isn’t thought born of some wild desire to anthropomorphize the world, it’s rooted in what science is beginning to know , what indigenous thought² has known since the beginning, everything is interconnected. Everything has agency. The “natural world” has wisdom, and knowledge, and acts and reacts and languages all its own. We’ve dismissed this because we’ve imagined our own way of being and seeing in the world is the best way.

What would it mean, I think, as I look back on this photo, if we truly understood the depth and breadth of the company we keep? How might our hearts beat differently in times of sorrow and heartbreak if we saw that we are never truly alone? How might our decisions about living on this planet change? What would it mean if we really believed that the illusion of isolation is more about perpetuating loneliness to drive capitalist greed?

The Lies We Live By and the Truths We Discover

We’ve been lied to. We’ve been told as a species:

that we are individual,
that we are exceptional,
that some beings matter more than other beings,
that some humans matter more than other humans,

And it is these lies that have created a great chasm of loneliness that humans are forever seeking our way out of. It has created purgatory out of paradise. Because we belong. We really do belong.

We are not singular, we are many³. Even within our own breathing human form, we are multitudes. We do not walk in the world, we walk with it.

You belong.

Reflections and Reminders

Daisies are my heartflower, and this more-than-human world is my company. They are reminders that beauty and resilience can be found in the most common, most mundane of places just as easily as they are found in the sublime. They are reminders that beauty and resilience are not solitary, they are always, necessarily, birthed in the (sometimes invisible) communal.

As I write this rain pours with force outside my window. June downpours giving love to thirsty daisies. Another year has passed, yet the moment with the daisy in the photo is still with me.

And because of that I am reminded that all of my moments are still with me. They live within me, have shaped me, I can reach out and touch them in my mind should I choose.

Time passes. But I still think about the daisy in the grass, the one who held the rain on her petals with such grace. The way her presence in rain and wind gave me something to hold onto. Something to anchor me in the real.

If a Daisy Could Speak on Belonging and Connection

I am not in the habit of speaking for daisies, but I think, if she could tell you anything, it might be this:

Remember that you are not alone, that you are part of a larger whole. A vast and brilliant and wild and tragic and densely populated, impossibly interconnected everything. Because everything is alive. Everything is connected. To touch a daisy is to touch all that her being and energy are connected to. It’s to touch her ancestors, all the wild daisies that came before her. And it is to touch all that she has witnessed. All that she knows. And when you do kneel before a daisy, or brush against her body with your hand, you have changed her path as well as your own. Existence is the greatest, wildest, mystery.

And all of that mystery connects us one to another.

So maybe, if you’re feeling lost, look for daisies. They’ll guide you home. And if you feel alone, look around you. Look within. This multispecied world is companion, and by its very abundance, it dissolves the illusion of isolation into an old and tired myth.