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Written by Bob Guyer
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Examining the relationship between water and life is the easiest way to see that we have to respect the non-separate nature of our individuality as co-occurring and interdependent with the separate nature of our individuality. What type of relationship do we have to soil, water, and the atmosphere?
How individual or alone are we? One of the primary signals that we are separate and alone is the fact that we have physical boundaries like skin and cell walls. How alone is a cell?
It has a boundary that separates it from every other cell in the body but cell membranes are permeable, they let some things into the cell from outside the cell, and they allow some things to leave the cell through the cell wall. There is water inside the cell membrane and water outside the cell membrane; the only differentiation relative to the water is the cell membrane. The structures that form on the inside of the cell wall also use and participate in the flow of the water across the semi-permeable membrane of the cell wall.
All separation from the surrounding environment for any particular structure seems to follow the same general pattern. The separated structures we see and animate, are constructed out of the material around them and don’t have an existence independent from these materials. The life forms and self-definition, separation, we experience is real, and at the same time completely interdependent and intercommunicative with everything around it, or not separate in any absolute sense, not truly alone.
The central nervous system uses the water in the cell and outside of the cell and its Semi-permeable membranes to generate an electrical charge. That charge travels along the axon to dendrite provide routes for intercommunication within the brain interconnecting with other cells. The spinal cord interconnects the entire body through the afferent and efferent nerves. The circulatory system also connects the entire body via water and cells of various types. Connective tissue connects the various individual parts of the body together.
On the external boundary of the individual defined by skin, lung, digestive, olfactory, and visual cells the mouth, gut and anus connect the individual to water and food that becomes the contents of the cells within their membranes. The lungs connect the individual to the environment through air and the process of respiration. Air connects to the whole individual via the transformation of air into oxygen at the alveoli and the marvelous transport of water in the blood through the cell wall of the red blood cell. Air continuously connects the individual to the environment, each other, and other life forms.
The sunlight, water, air, soil, weather, plant and animal life all provide the physical material that allows human beings to survive. We are made of all the material around us on the physical level. We are in no way able to separate from all the constituents of the physical world around us and continue to exist as physical creatures.
Each individual is then also interconnected physically with each every other individual through atmosphere, water, soil, sunlight, plant and animal life. So even on the physical level of our existence we are clearly separate independent entities and we are so interconnected with each other and everything around us that we are a whole process of life that is fully shared and not individual in the exclusive sense at all.
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Living Earth 
