“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent. A part of the main.”

John Donne

Never Enough

I don’t know much about humans, never enough. But I do see one thing clearly nowadays: We are not created in isolation. Even if sometimes that’s what we wish to be: Alone, washed away on a deserted island somewhere.

Yet something in our evolutionary design still reaches—like it does for sunsets, for trees, for the breeze—for one quiet thing: Community.

Loving and Fighting

The modern age has transformed our evolutionary existence in many ways—and the loss of community is one of the most profound. For most of our history, we lived and breathed in close-knit groups of 20 to 30 people. People who worked the fields together, who shared meals under a bonfire, who loved and fought and forgave—always as a community.

We were good at this. Yet modern life has taken us on a different kind of journey.

Promises

A journey of walls, passwords, usernames, and lives divided by calendars instead of rivers. It did promise us many things, this journey: freedom, self, choice, ambition, a life and a room of our own.

And in many ways, it did deliver on its promises.

But it also took things.

Like A Friend

It took the kind of belonging that never had to be earned—only tended to. But in our golden modern age, everything must be earned: Jobs, rest, insurance, even friendship, sometimes.

And the world with its trees, its rivers, its people is still here, plain to see. Just scattered. No longer close enough to tap us on the shoulder like a friend.

Yet I keep hearing that globalization slogan: “We’re more connected than ever.”

But connected to what? Community came with nature, and nature came with community. The fig tree came with its wasp. The coral reef with its polyps and algae. The forest with its people. The rule was simple: stay together. And somehow—we broke that.

I Don’t Bite

The link between community and nature is getting clearer to me every day that I spend on this planet. Not in theory, but in feeling. In the way birds climb the sky together in my window every morning, and in the way fungi remember the language of its forest, like my mother always remembers mine. In how the seaweed clings to rock and never lets go, even when the waves shout: “Let go.” In how the tree outside my window saves me every day. Everywhere I look, all I see are hands holding each other. Soft, small and unseen hands that do not bite. Only hold.