I’m headed to a back pocket of the forest to see why a couple of trees keep calling me back. They can’t have a voice, I remind myself. Not because they’re trees, but because they’ve died.

As I approach, a hare bolts out from the deep hole where the trees once stood. I feel bad for scaring it away, but it’s long gone now. I walk to the edge of the hole. One tree has fallen north, the other south, and between them is a tremendous tangle of roots. It’s impossible to tell which roots belong to which tree. They’re like arms shared by both bodies.

When one tree fell, the root system must have been pulled up, causing the other to fall too. Now they lay on the ground in opposite directions as if drawn by different magnetic poles.

One of the thickest roots also belongs to a third tree, which hasn’t fallen yet has turned a sickly gray color. Some sort of fungus is claiming it now. My guess is that it died alongside the other two. The shared root system undoubtedly provided many benefits to these trees for many hundreds of years, affording them robustness and resilience to grow into the enormous beings that they became. But on one fatal day, it might have brought about their collective demise.

In the gaping hole left behind, tiny ponds have formed. They could be watering holes for deer and rabbits. Maybe breeding places for frogs. The mere presence of shallow water and light means that anything is possible here. While the origins of life on earth remain a mystery, many believe the first life forms were cradled in warm little ponds just like these.

Amongst the tree roots and across their fallen bodies, I watch ants crawl. Beetles too. And so many critters I don’t know the names of. Spiders have woven extravagant formations in between the upturned roots. Mushrooms are popping up in all shapes and forms. Tender green plants too. I believe one of them is an oak sapling, and the thought of an oak tree rising from the remains of a fallen pine is one I love.

These trees are far from dead, I realize. When that windstorm came and ripped them up from the earth, it was both an end and a beginning. A transition from one vital role into another equally vital role.

I stare into their entangled roots for a long time, knowing that’s why I came back today. They’re a miniature representation of a greater reality I’ve been waking up to. A pattern that keeps emerging wherever I look.

Now I can’t unsee the entanglement everywhere.

Even as I walk out of the forest I keep getting wrapped up in silk threads. Totally invisible until they’re dangling from my body, flashing like silvery strands of hair.

At one point, I stop to remove some that have enveloped my face, and it’s as if the scales fall from my eyes and I can see, all the empty air is laced with threads holding droplets of dew, small insects, sometimes a pine needle or two, always the iridescent light.

In the world of quantum physics, entanglement is described as two particles that remain correlated, such that the state observed in one particle will be identical for the other, even if they’re in totally different galaxies of the universe. This inextricable connection requires no communication, at least as we conceive of communication. It’s as if they are not two at all, but one.

These interactions occur with electrons, photos, particles, molecules, basically all the things that make up our universe.

Hundreds or even thousands of particles can become quantum entangled. For example, a murmuration of starlings which can sharply change directions and formations without ever colliding into one another. A murmuration is not collection of individuals, but one unit operating on some higher plane, as if sharing a single mind that moves their bodies.

Like sticky threads of a web, you couldn’t separate them no matter how hard you tried. Throw a bomb into the murmuration, and all you do is destroy the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping physical manifestation of a bond that will endure on some level.

Entanglement is what holds life together. It’s the adhesive of a web we cannot free ourselves from. The more we try, the more entangled we become. The more entangled it all becomes with us too.

I think of the sheep whose wool fleece is a result of human breeding that began some 10,000 years ago. We generated the growth of wool for our own needs, and now we’re responsible for keeping it sheared. We can’t neglect the sheep now. They depend on us.

How many other species have co-evolved with us? How many species live right within our bodies, making the pulses of electricity and consciousness possible? We are hundreds of entanglements walking around on a planet that is also the result of an endless number of relational interactions.

I used to think we’ve become separate from nature, but now I’m beginning to see, we haven’t. And we cannot. If we’re alive, then we’re entangled with forces and forms, interactions and processes both within and beyond our comprehension.

The idea of separateness is an illusion. We can’t take a single breath on our own.

These interactions aren’t always positive, of course. I certainly don’t appreciate the head lice that my kids bring home from school sometimes. Or the armies of snails that invade my garden every single night all summer long. And don’t get me started about all the undue violence we cause for so many species across the globe.

Just this week, I found myself weeping as I read about several hundreds of dolphins being driven into coves and mass murdered so that people of the Solomon islands could use their teeth as currency. They believe they have no choice but to slaughter these highly intelligent, social, spirted beings. Climate change is causing sea levels to rise, putting the Fanalei people at risk of losing their homes. They need to build new homes on higher ground, but the only way they can afford to do that is by harvesting the currency they need. In their culture, dolphin teeth is currency.

So many connections are implicit in this act of violence against dolphins. It’s human and non-human. Land and sea. Capitalism and climate change. Upstream and downstream. Old and new. Life and death. Always two sides of the same coin. Whatever happens to one instantly happens to the other.

Now we are back in the quantum world. We cannot escape it.

Knowing that separation isn’t even possible allows us to become more conscious participants in all the relationships we’re entangled with. To realize that everything is part of some whole. Alive and conscious. Connected and essential to the rest. That we cannot progress at the expense of nature, because we can’t exist separately from it. That even the natural world we inhabit is part of something larger.

The mechanistic view of life is coming undone.

It was constructed when certain men reduced the world down to organisable matter and called themselves “enlightened.” There were many, but Francis Bacon comes to mind right now. Cited as the father of empiricism, or the philosopher of industrial science, Bacon posed science as “a new instrument of human inquiry which will satisfy humanity’s imperial ambitions over the natural world.” He believed humans could come to understand every detail about life and successfully manage it, thus giving us total mastery over nature.

With this desire for control came a lot of arrogance and violence. In fact, for Bacon, it was only possible to understand the secrets of nature through violence. His methods of experimentation unleashed nothing less than torture upon every living thing on earth.

Nature went from a living world of interconnected relationships to one that was pulled apart, dissected, categorised, charted, put in arbitrary hierarchies. Life had no intrinsic value of its own. Everything was valued only as an object of human use and control.

Out of these extractive scientific ethics, modern civilization evolved. They seeped into every branch of science – social, political, chemical, biological, ecological, psychological, etc. – and informed the industrial-techno capitalism we find ourselves in today. The term materialistic has two meanings, which are correlated in my opinion. It’s both the incessant and unsatisfactory accumulation of objects and the philosophical underpinning that says everything is just an object. An ethics that was supposedly born out of scientific objectivity. Well, I object.

All “our efforts to control nature always end badly,” as Ted Nordhaus puts it in Why We Can’t Leave Nature Alone. “Nature is endlessly complex and our capacities to understand it are far more limited than arrogant engineers are capable of comprehending.”

Even with the best of intentions, conservationists and technocrats alike attempt to fix one problem yet repeatedly create more and more problems. There are invisible threads everywhere. Roots connected in some unknown source. We keep trying to free ourselves, free everything, but it’s all too damn entangled.

It turns out, Life is something we’re imbued with, not in control of. And the Earth is a body we belong to, not one we own. To think that we’re superior here would be like saying that only one part of our own body has inherent value while the rest of it is purely extraneous. Well of course that’s absurd. Our body functions as a whole. Each cell, organ, process and system works together to create our overall health. And health extends beyond our body’s basic functioning. We are living beings not subject to physical laws only. We have mental, emotional, social, and perhaps spiritual experiences that transcend the material world. Which makes us far more complex than any physical clump of matter, no matter how complexly constructed the matter might be. We are not merely systems of chemical interactions. We are certainly not machines. Like all other life forms and the universe at large, we’re made up of things both physical and nonphysical.

In fact, only about 5% of the universe is composed of ordinary physical matter. The other 95% is composed of stuff scientists cannot see, detect or even comprehend. It seems that our physical experience is held within some sort of nonphysical reality. Which might sound contradictory at first, but perhaps they’re actually complementary. Two sides of the same coin.

This is the beauty of quantum science. It’s the quantum leap we’re being asked to take.

What quantum science shows us, time and time again, is that the universe is composed of potentialities rather than objects. Wave-like energies or frequencies that collapse into physical matter only when they’re measured or observed. Until then, it seems there is something bigger at play.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

– Nikola Tesla

Once you realize that materialism isn’t the absolute truth about reality, that it’s only a belief system, then there is space for it to naturally shift as needed. While we can’t separate ourselves from the entanglement of life, we can untangle ourselves from limited thinking – and limited imagination! We can begin to embrace scientific inquiry that emancipates and empowers, leaving behind a science that wishes only to dominate and alienate.

Personally, I feel freer than ever! In my own creativity, in how I perceive and navigate the world, in everything and everyone I interact with, there’s just more space.

Life, too, has exponentially more meaning. I belong to something so vast, something that is designed with an infinite number of potentialities and might even be requesting my participation in order to become fully manifest. I think it could be the something “more” I’ve been seeking my entire life.

xx
Beth

(Originally published on Wyld studio’s Substack).