Horton Hears A Who

One of my favorite children's books is Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss. It's a wonderful story poem about an elephant that discovers an entire community of "whos" living on a speck of dust. Though I don't remember reading it as a child, as an adult it brought back a memory of childhood when I finally read it. I distinctly remember staring at my arm as a young child wondering if there was a whole world present on the surface of my skin, and in turn wondering if perhaps I was a flea on the surface of some enormous creature, so enormous I couldn't even see it. When I was introduced to the Gaia Hypothesis, it echoed something that I had sensed all my life: that perhaps the earth itself was an organism. And then it was wonderful to imagine what it might mean if this organism had a consciousness. It was so exciting to think there were worlds within worlds and my "world" was only one of many and that maybe one of the creatures on my skin pondered over the possibility of me having a consciousness. Fractal geometry added to the intrigue and I fell in love with the search for repeating patterns all around me.

I suppose that most children wonder about these things. There was a time that school subjects like chemistry and biology reduced my body to carbon, hydrogen and oxygen or organs, cells and organelles until I could barely remember or recognize the mystique of those worlds around me. But eventually, as time passed and I learned to keep asking questions, until the mystique returned until I couldn't look at a tree without feeling a kinship to the one that not only shares this enormous body we are living on, but is in fact an extension of my own body, my lungs incomplete without its presence. I am not an isolated entity. I belong to something much greater than myself. I am part of an amazing, intricate beautiful evolving pattern and as such a shift in me will shift the entire pattern.