12 Dec 2025 3 min read

Interbeing, continuity and the present

being a collection of "random", "unconnected" and 99% percent unedited photos and TOO MANY WORDS

“It’s not that you will have inherited particular material parts from some ancient life-form, but that there is a chain of such relationships—the cells in you containing parts of earlier cells, which contained parts of earlier ones, and so on,” he writes.
“When we look back then, it’s not just that we are living organisms, examples of life, and such things were around back then as well. And it’s not just that the link of reproduction has been present since then, with old organisms somehow making new ones. We are also a material continuation of what was here before… Our ties to ancient life-forms are not just a matter of causal connection. A stronger bond connects old and new organisms, projecting life through time, and this bond has been in place for most of the history of the Earth and much of the history of the universe.”
--Peter Godfrey-Smith in Alexis Madrigal on Substack

That is the vertical/historical view. Just as important is the horizontal, the present, the common, the relational one.

We are being duped, undermined, circumscribed, blinded, misinformed, deformed by an assault on our bonds.

Some bonds are now barely visible. Some seem circumstantial, circumscribed and accidental.

All are real and fundamental.

Without our bonds, we are not.

The totalitarians are against all that.

Not because they deny it as a reality, but because it is not functional for them: it does not achieve their aims.

Define their aims, you say?

Control, extraction, accumulation, power over connection, filling the void within, idolatry, raging pride, denial of death, immortality, a panopticon in the service of the self, turning self-hatred on others, subjugation, torture.