"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level
what my atoms are doing is their fucking business man i'm busy trying to stop my dog from eating tissues directly out of the box
nuclei don't touch, but the nucleus is not the core of reality. reality is made of electrons dancing. reality is made of bonds.
you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.
electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.
you pet your dog and the electron-orbitals of your skin overlap with the electron-orbitals of his fur, and both are changed by the contact. you are not made of little motes floating alone in a void. you are a single unfathomable chord formed of a trillion vibrations, and so is he. and the note you play is changing at every moment by what you touch and how you breathe, and so is his. and atoms do not really have edges, and to touch is to interact, and when you put your hand on your dog the universe does not know that you are separate. the song expands to hold you both.
The world touches and shapes you constantly
Your flesh is borrowed from others, bit by bit, bite by bite, and returned as fertilizer when you are done with it. Your breath borrowed from algae and trees and returned just as fast. The water in your blood filtered through roots and exhaled from leaves to fall again in the rocky highlands where springs feed.
Your dog and you share space, and so you share air, pieces of them recognized by you as a smell of friendship and love. Oils made to protect your skin work into your dog as you scratch and rub, and so a part of you becomes a part of them.
Your skin is sacrificial, a chain-link wall of flattened dead cells that leave tiny imperceptible fragments on every object you touch. Your passage through the world peels away your outer layers as you grow without ceasing, glowing dimly all the while with the luminous warmth of your chemistry and vitality.
When you walk in parts of the world that are still Alive, every step brings you in contact with other Life. We must wrap ourselves in the woven tissues of dead plants and borrowed skins of dead animals, pants and coats and boots, to protect ourselves from such contact. Every place where you can walk freely had to be first cleared, and covered with a protective veneer of dead flat stone. Any patch of earth liberated from such bondage bursts forth with Life anew given half a chance and a spring rain.
The appearance of your isolation is an illusion.
The world flows through you. You are it. It is you.
