Breathing With the World: Solitude Without Separation
I was sitting alone in our empty apartment after Happy and Arash had gone to visit her mother, feeling the familiar weight of solitude, when I noticed my breathing. Not just the act of breathing, but the conversation—oxygen flowing in, carbon dioxide flowing out, the plants on our balcony participating in the exchange that keeps me alive every second.
I had never been alone. Not once in my life.
Every breath connects me to the green world. Every heartbeat pumps blood made from minerals drawn from ancient soils. Every thought requires glucose created by photosynthesis. I am always in relationship, always part of an ongoing conversation between my body and the living systems that sustain it.
The bacteria in my gut outnumber my own cells. The mitochondria powering my muscles descended from ancient microorganisms. My bones are built from calcium that cycled through countless other beings. I am not a solitary individual—I am a collaborative ecosystem, a temporary arrangement of elements borrowed from the earth.
Loneliness is the illusion of separation. But separation is impossible when you’re made of the same materials as mountains, when your water was once part of rivers and rain, when your carbon was once part of trees and algae and the breath of other animals.
The air around me isn’t empty space—it’s a medium full of microbial life, plant chemicals, the exhalations of every breathing thing within miles. I swim through an ocean of interactions, exchanges, relationships that keep me alive without my awareness or permission.
Even in the most isolated moments, I’m accompanied by processes older than consciousness—circulation, digestion, cellular repair—all of them connecting me to the planetary systems that invented them billions of years ago.
The loneliness I feel isn’t real isolation. It’s forgetting my membership in the community of life, forgetting that my body is made of earth and air and water, forgetting that I’m always in conversation with the living world.
When I remember this, solitude transforms from isolation to intimacy with everything.
