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Abundance is the natural state of the world.
If you leave something alone, it thrives. Anyone who thinks that life is a competitive battlefield filled with individuals struggling, clawing at each other to survive, needs to get outside more.
When you get out in it, that's not what life is. That might be what we have made our lives, but it's not what life *is*.
Sit still and listen to the forest. Pause at the edge of grassy meadow in the moonlight and listen. Crouch in a crook of red sandstone halfway up the canyon wall and listen. Here the insects, the birds, the wind. The conception of the world as struggle did not come from observation of the world.
Observing the world you very rarely find individuals struggling. To be sure, creatures eat each other. Just today I watched a wasp and spider have an epic battle, I turned away for a moment though, and when I looked back, both were gone. Who won? I have no idea. Probably neither. Even if the spider did kill the wasp, it was gone from its web.
Watching this though I couldn't help but think it was actually less an epic battle than a kind of dance. Martial arts, deadly though it can be, often looks like ballet. That's what the spider and wasp looked like, a kind of deadly ballet.
is flat wrong. It's flat wrong for many reasons, but the one that's come to interest me the most is that that boundary between individual and environment is not nearly so neat and clean as we like to imagine.
That is to say, in order for there to be competition there must be individuals and, when you start looking closely, the line between you and everything is indistinct at best.
There is a harmonic resonance between the world and forms that fill it. There is a kind of vibrating, edge-blurring, feedback loop. Things move, change, do what they need to do, others dissolve, morph, recombine in new ways. Nothing is still, nothing is static, nothing is cut off from anything else. We're still not sure where a tree ends: is it the roots? The mats of fungi feeding nutrients to the roots, without which the tree would die? Where is the beginning and end?
The better question might be, why are we looking for these things? Where did we get the idea that things begin and end?
If you do pause somewhere and sit and be still and watch, listen, smell, taste, you'll also notice something very important: you are part of this harmonic dance going on around you. The grass presses against your feet, the gnats explore your skin, the carpenter bees' wings announce their arrival to you.
Many don't even think of themselves as part of the environment at all, which is part of why they know nothing of the abundance of the world. When we separate ourselves in our minds, when we see ourselves as separate from the ecosystem, the abundance goes away.
When you live in a bubble, that bubble starts to become the world. It's too easy to live in our bubbles, it becomes hard to reach out. And to do so without passing judgement. Just to say there are all kids of people living here and they're all different, and that's okay. There is no one right way.
Homeschooling bothers people because it implies we're living on a single income, and that that's enough. I think it reminds people that that did *use* to be enough, but that things have declined from that, that it is simply no longer possible.
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