We Are Not Separate...
A Poem on Becoming & Belonging

Our bodies are not just bodies--
 they are landscapes,
 living maps of a deeper remembering.

We are not standing on the Earth.
 We are of it.

Seventy percent water--
 like oceans breathing at the shore,
 like tides that rise and fall without effort.

 There is a rhythm in us
 that remembers the moon.

Inside this skin,
 whole ecosystems are alive--
 trillions of unseen beings
 moving, exchanging, relating.

 A forest of intelligence
 we call “me.”

Not a single organism,
 but a field of belonging.

Every cell knows how to belong.
 And in that belonging,
 something begins to become.

Just as the Earth holds deserts and jungles,
 fire and ice,
 our inner world holds climates of experience--
 places untouched,
 places overgrown,
 places waiting for rain.

Our bones—ancient minerals.
 Our blood—rivers in motion.
 Our breath—like forests,
 receiving and giving life.

We are not separate systems.
 We are a reflection.

Mountains rise in the spine.
 Valleys soften in the heart.
 Weather moves through our moods--
 storms, droughts, sudden clearings.

And like the Earth,
 we are never still.

We are seasons.
 We are cycles.
 We are the unfolding of change.

Stability is not stillness--
 It is the capacity to move in harmony.

And yet, somewhere along the way,
 we forgot.

We believed ourselves separate--
 from the soil,
 from each other,
 from the quiet intelligence moving through all things.

We learned to hold back our becoming
 to protect our belonging.
 Or to abandon belonging
 in the name of becoming.

And so the natural rhythm was broken.

But life has not forgotten.

There is something in us--
 a deeper knowing--
 that still moves toward wholeness.

Like a child who returns to safety
 and then runs back into the world,
 we are always moving between
 belonging and becoming.

When we feel safe,
 we grow.

When we are held,
 we unfold.

There is an intelligence in us
 that knows the way.

What if healing is remembering?

That this body
 is not an object to control,
 but a living field to tend.

That when we soften,
 when we slow down,
 when we listen--
 we begin to feel
 the deeper ecology of our being.

And in that feeling,
 something ancient returns.

A knowing.

That we are not alone,
 not broken,
 not separate.

But part of a vast,
 interconnected unfolding.

The Earth does not rush.
 It does not force its becoming.

It rests in its belonging
 and from there,
 everything grows.

And so can we.

When we return.
 When we remember.

 When we tend
 the soil of our own being
 with care,
 with humility,
 with love.

Because what we heal in ourselves,
 we heal in the world.

And what we restore within,
 restores the whole.

We are not standing on the Earth.

We are the Earth
 belonging… and becoming…
 aware of itself.
​
— Michael Stone