Interbeing – 20″ x 24″ – woven photographs , paint, glass beads, on canvas – Ordinary Time, 2010.
On this 4th day of July, I’ve been pondering the ideas of independence and inter-dependence. We tend to think of independence as an ideal, both personally and socially. As young people, we want to be independent from our parents; as grown-ups, we envy those who are independently wealthy. We admire independent thinkers, and strong self-sufficiency characterizes our heroes, especially here in the West.
But if we are honest with ourselves, independence is a myth. Not a single one of us can be truly independent. Even if we were to go live in the woods, fell trees to build a shelter, and subsist on only what food we could grow or gather, (and I don’t think that is very likely for even one person who will read this, although some might come closer than others,) no creature on this earth can exist without the contribution of other creatures; from the trees that provide materials for shelter, to the bacteria that help us digest food. We cannot create for ourselves the air we breathe, the water we drink, the sun that warms us, or the people that give meaning to our lives. We are completely and utterly interdependent.
This piece of art was inspired by a passage from a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a very wise spiritual teacher. When I read it, I wanted to find a way to express the idea visually, so I took two copies of each of the photographs that make up the piece, cut them in strips, and wove them together. And because I am inclined to look at things theistically, I underlaid the whole thing with a field of gold, which also holds the whole piece together in the form of beads that stitch it to the canvas, to represent the Divine with which we are also, always, inter-being.
I’ve copied the passage from Thich Nhat Hanh below, as some of you will enjoy his insight on the subject. The photograph of the planet is from Visible Earth, a project of NASA that publishes an amazing array of satellite photos and other information about the planet. The woman’s face is the female face of Sao Paulo, Brazil, from the Face of Tomorrow project, which makes composite photographs of people in different cities of the world. I chose Sao Paulo partly because it is so ethnically diverse, and therefore broadly representative of humanity.
As you go through your day today, tomorrow, the day after, see if you can recognize some ways in which you are inter-being with the the world, with the people, even strangers, around you, with the environment, and with the Divine.
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From The Heart of Understanding, Thich Nhat Hanh’s commentaries on the Heart Sutra:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing.