We are Systems, Not Categories

I recently learned a new word: holobiont. A holobiant is an animal or plant and all the symbiotic microorganisms living on or inside it, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses. I'm one, you're one. 

"We ourselves are not singular," writes Rebecca Solnit in her new book The Beginning Comes After the End, "each of us, but plural, a cooperative community. About half the cells in our body do not have human DNA, and your gut, skin, mouth, and many other parts of you are populated places. These are the strains of bacteria and other microbes crucial to your digestion, immune health, and other functions, and they make you a plural being, a lurching collective of mutual beneficial entities."

In other words, we are no the individual, independent entities our culture tells us we are, but rather a system of cooperation and agreement, that is likewise a part of wider systems. Even our minds, this seemingly central thing that we often identify as our self, is created by this interconnected system of mutual benefit, a cooperative community. It would be more accurate to say, "We're hungry" than "I'm hungry." "We're tired." "We're stressed." "We're happy."

We've been taught by our culture to bifurcate ourselves from the rest of nature, to somehow see ourselves as separate, not just from the rest of nature, but from one another. It's a philosophy in which everything is categorized. "Categories," writes Solnit, "are the antithesis of systems, at least when the categories are deployed in service of an anti systemic worldview and of containment by conceptual and literal boundaries. A system is by definition in motion, connecting and circulating, made up of the flow of interactions and exchanges; it is a process of change."

And change is learning. 

I can't help but see a play-based preschool classroom in this description, the ebb and flow of children moving, connecting, circulating, weaving a web of interactions and exchanges. There are conflicts, of course, but there are also agreements. There are times when the system seems to become chaotic, but also times when it settles into the perfection of a bee hive, a place where we understand the true nature of nature, and that we, not me, is the central, ever evolving, unit of life.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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