On days like today, I feel the need to reflect on connection and humanity.
Embrace
We've heard before that a hug takes 7 seconds before oxytocin is released. Or is it 20 seconds?
Many of those closest to me have an aversion to touch or embrace. I have a particular friend who feels a visceral reaction to the thought of hugs. But strangely and fortunately not with me.
Once or twice a week, when we see each other, we run to each other to hug for what would otherwise be an awkward length of time but for the fact that it's so healing for both of us. Today we held each other for an especially long time.
I often wonder that for all of us, it's not about 7 seconds or 20 seconds, but about what forms the connection.
I wasn't raised to physical affection, but I now crave it in all forms. However, the thought of embracing the family I was raised with always filled me with unshakable discomfort, even before we were estranged, even as the smallest child.
Tentacles
Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if we were all cephalopods instead of mammals. Instead of two arms to embrace, we could have eight, the same number as the tendrils of the star of one of my sisters, the Star of Inanna. We could tangle and hold the ones we love and never let go.
I was reading a meme post recently about the idea that when we touch something, the atoms that make up our material substance never actually touch. In one sense you might believe that you have never truly touched anything, but this is simply a paradigm.
Someone in the post went on to explain that while this might be true in a sense, our reality is made of electrons dancing. Our reality is made of electrons bonding through this dance. They may never touch, but that bond is no less real.
They continue by saying that at the quantum level, I am "a single unfathomable chord formed by a trillion vibrations" and so are you, and when we touch, when our electrons dance together, the universe can't tell where I end and you begin. That our vibrations form a single song.
And I think of the bonds we share with the ones around us. I imagine we are bound together by tendrils that we cannot see, that permeate the substance of everything. I think of quantum entanglement and the links we share no matter the distance in time or space.
Stars
At night, I like to sit on my garden swing as I smoke a leaf originating from the land of my ancestors, that my sisters have smoked for thousands of years in ceremony and love, and also in the effort to heal the same pain in our hearts. I think of a goddess they've all cried to, as I do, and I look to the same evening star that they once did.
And each time, I reflect on the idea that we are closer to the size of the universe than the Planck length– the shortest physically measurable distance without creating a black hole. And I wonder at the incomprehensible size of the universe.
I think about how we are not only composed of the atomic, but also of the biological, and that our physical forms are each their own ecosystem, with microscopic discrete living entities that together form our bodies. That our bodies themselves are part of larger ecosystems. That the universe is not one thing, but is the summation of fractured and distanced matter, and that this matter still holds the bonds of gravity, spacetime, and possibly yet quantum connections.
I take in all the stars in the sky and I think about how we're all made of stardust and I imagine how far away those stars are, impossible distances, and the time it took for the light to reach us. I think on the light from stars that we will never see, because we move away from each other at such speeds that we will never know them by their light, and yet, we still sustain a bond.
And then I think about how when we were stardust, we knew those stars. We would touch them. I remember that there was a time before time that as stardust, we were all hugging in a celestial embrace.
And then in less than a single second, we fractured and threw ourselves away from each other in a violent explosion in order to form the universe around us.
And something in me just feels the echo of a distant yearning to go back to that embrace, and that if we all did– us, the planets, the stars– that eventually we'd all finally feel whole again.
And before this thought brings me to the brink of despair, in my best moments, I remind myself that there are no ends, only means, and I remember that time is an axis, and that on different coordinates along our plane, we are still whole, and that it's possible we will all embrace again.
no ends, only means