Substance

We tend to abstract the state of the world into graphs: to nodes and associations between them, to paths, either open or closed. To categories, like colors, genders, nations, religions, political parties, ideologies. Water and land, yes and no, good and bad. To metrics, that we know to how define, obtain, compare, and thus determine the best option, and discard the others. To territories: the mine and the yours and the theirs. In so doing we compile and grasp a functional understanding of the world around us, which enables us to learn, live, communicate, and thrive as people do.

Yet beneath this mental web and index that we live by day after day, lies substance. Perennial, dense, swayed and swaying substance, that inhabits the mass of this world. It constitutes our bodies, our organs, our bones. It is the make-up of our fluids, and of the airs we breathe together. It is the rivers and the riverbeds, the fruit trees and the supporting soil. It is bulked up in the cars we drive, the phones we carry, in the food we digest. Substance composes the national leaders, the brain matter that guides their actions, the ink in their pen, the hand sinews that guide it onto document signatures, as well as the bodies of all the peoples these documents affect.

And it permeates all that is in between: the air, the walls, the soils, the forests - nothing truly separates us from each other. As we move and think and work and live our lives, we all share the same gel-like mass that encompasses and pervades us, whose membranes and wide range of subtlety (from rock to space) provide the illusion that we are separate beings.