We Are All Brothers. Really. I Mean Really.

I felt compelled to share this experience today of all days because I have been engaging in a pseudo-debate with a fundamentalist Christian woman who felt the need to bring evolution into our conversation on same-sex marriage and abortion. I will spare you all the details for now.  The pertinent statement she made was "a scientist says we are born from monkeys and you believe them." Well, not exactly, and I'm very sorry she misunderstood her science lessons. The theory states that humans and apes have a common ancestor. We did not evolve from monkeys; we evolved from the same animal monkeys evolved from. I know that this distinction doesn't make any difference to our Christian friend, but it is a very important distinction to make. Our Christian friend probably also fails to understand the concept of a scientific theory, using such ignorant statements as "X is just a theory," but her failure to understand these things is not my point, so I will move on with my tale.

A few years back, I had been working in my garden, and was enjoying a meditative moment of stillness with sun on my skin and the songs of birds in my ears, when I began to stroke a blade of spider grass that was growing next to the place I was sitting on the Earth. As I touched this simple blade of grass that could easily have been ignored under my feet as I walked past, I began thinking about my physical relation to everything that surrounded me. It struck me all at once, in a moment of deep intuitive understanding, that I and this blade of grass are kin; not in some fluffy new-age metaphorical sense, but in a real, physical, evolutionary sense. Once upon a time, long ago, or perhaps not so long ago, that blade of grass and I had a common mother. This realization struck me not simply as a fact, an idea in my mind, but rather as something deeper that rocked me at the core of my being.  It is still to this day one of the most intense spiritual experiences of my life.

It truly boggles my mind how people in their pretentious need to be "greater than" can miss the most intensely intimate knowledge of the universe. We are all brothers: not metaphorically, but ACTUALLY. As death sits waiting for us all at the end of our lives, causing us to feel this sense of urgency and loneliness in the knowledge that we each die alone, some people have to believe it won't really end, completely ignoring the incredible beauty we share: we are all together in this. We are all brothers. We are all made of stardust. We are all born, and we all die, perhaps temporally apart from one another, but in actuality we share death with everyone and everything around us... even the stars and the Earth and the sun, someday. We really, physically are brothers, all of us. That beautiful flowering tree out there in my yard is really, factually, my cousin. I cannot imagine a heaven more beautiful, or comforting, than that.