I’ve uncovered a trail heretofore forgotten. Sometimes it takes the shape of two wings fluttering from nectar source to nectar source. Sometimes it comes and goes in a breath and doesn’t take any shape at all. It can be dark also, and unidentifiable. Sometimes it is parasitic, but more often it is symbiotic, because that is the way it has to be, mathematically speaking. Life partners with life, benefit with benefit, aid with aid, and diversity flourishes. A superhighway of arteries, a deep, dense matrix of birth and life and death, breathing and held by something that exists outside the boundaries of my skin. It whispers “buen provecho” to me in the night when the cycle renews, at least for me, and the pictures pull together stories from the heart of the host organism. Small becomes large, large becomes small, and the distance from my fingers to my toes fits inside a speck of dust and cannot be contained by the solar system, all at once. What is waste to me, the last incarnation of something I knew as nourishment, becomes someone else’s magnet to continue on for another time, long or short, depending on the beholder. And I realize there is nothing to transcend, nothing to escape, but to momentarily rest in the sweet symphony of a feathered being who mimics the sound of a drop of water and wonder what it is that my footsteps sound like to him.
Symbiosis is the rule (rather than the exception) in the rainforest. It makes sense. Rainforests are the world's breadbaskets of biodiversity. Variance is the norm. Strategies that benefit two instead of one lead to more diversity than strategies that benefit one instead of two. Mindless, expansive, monospecific plowing of life does not exist here—that is a phenomenon in the human-dominated world. In the rainforest, humans are the proverbial little fish in a big, big, big pond, and thank God for that. Our inevitable concessions are simply a note in a larger rhythm, and thank God for that, as well. Our once-formidable kingdoms—those of mind as well as those of society—become overgrown, lost, and crumbling. Besotted with water and fungus and rot. Serenaded by the births and lives and deaths of countless other organisms, other ontological systems, other keepers of time. AI could survive neither the light nor the dark of this masterpiece. Even programming is subject to corrosion.
In other words, take refuge in the breast of the conductor.
The symphony of the rainforest is conducted in notes of water. You cannot unwind the story to its origin, because there is no origin. Rather, there are series of cycles organized in niches, and we Homo sapiens can only understand those stories to the parameters of our own cognitive systems. Yet inklings tell us that things exist outside of our cognitive systems. There are sounds we cannot hear. Colors we cannot see. Realms we cannot visit, only dream or imagine. And in the rainforest, even the spaces between the living things are alive. Water, remember, is the currency. It is not still. It is not an identifiable point on a map. It is the afterbirth of a mammalian being's entry to the physical world. It nourishes the ground where it lands, a bloodied richness to the beings who consume it and transform it to something else. And that is just one sentence from one snippet from one story. Do you think it is you who breathes your body, who sleeps your body, who pumps the blood in your arterial network? Tell me when you have done it.
I want to share some stories of symbiosis from the Amazon. Leaf-cutter ants, for example, do not cut leaves to feed themselves. Instead, they cut leaves to feed the pristine white fungus they occupy. The fungus (ironically, perhaps, to us humans) seems to prefer coca leaves, and as the fungus grows, it increasingly resembles a pile of white powder, much like cocaine. The ants dutifully feed their home until it grows large enough for them to create within it a palace of chambers and balconies and nurseries and thrones. The fungus provides a home, and the ants feed their home.
Oropendola birds, rich in variety across altitude and acreage, are commonly sighted denizens in the Amazon. In the lowlands, they build their nests amongst those of hornets. The hornets protect the nested tree from creatures who are interested in consuming oropendola eggs, while the oropendolas protect the hornets from bees. Fire ants nest in Palo Santo trees, whose sweet fragrance draws all sorts of interested consumers to its leaves and fruits. The Palo Santo trees give the fire ants a home in exchange for protection from those interested consumers. And the monkeys—my favorite, always my favorite—also exhibit interspecies symbiosis. Squirrel monkeys and brown capuchins travel together, the smaller squirrels sharing pathways to delicious fruits with the larger capuchins, who in turn travel the outer perimeter of the route to keep an eye out for sky-travelers like harpy eagles.
Relationships, the rainforest has shown me, are the point. We do not walk through this world un-touching the things around us. It is impossible, and—dare I say—human folly, to think otherwise. We, in our desire for earthly dominion and in search of the eternal El Dorado, in our bumbling quest for transcendence and in believing the stories of our grandstanding minds, have become the wayward child of the earthly mother. And, as is the illuminating case for all paradoxes, our greatest asset is also our greatest weakness. I'm just no longer sure that we will eventually find our way home.
