Inter-being

Inter-being

This artwork is titled Inter-being.

The title has been with me for some time, but recently I have been returning to it with new eyes.

Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term inter-being and I came across a passage by him in which he speaks of the biologist Lewis Thomas and his observation that our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other organisms. Our bodies, he suggests, are not solitary entities at all, but communities of life. Without these countless others, we could not move, think, feel or even be here.

I was struck by how beautifully this connects with something I have been pondering in my own work: relationality and porosity.

We tend to think of ourselves as separate beings, each contained within the boundary of an individual body. Yet the more closely we look, the more difficult that boundary becomes to sustain. We breathe the world into ourselves. We exchange matter with it. We are inhabited by other forms of life. We are shaped by the people we encounter, the places we inhabit, the histories we carry and the relationships through which we become who we are.

Perhaps, then, inter-being is more than being connected to one another.

Connection can suggest that there are separate things which then enter into relationship. Inter-being suggests something deeper: that relationship is already part of what we are.

The two figures in my artwork appear to be joined by various markings passing across them. The small hyphen in the title is intentional. It becomes a kind of bridge between inter and being, between one and another, between self and other, between what appears separate and what may never have been separate at all.

This makes me think again about Presence.

Perhaps Presence is not something that belongs to an individual. Perhaps it arises within the space between us, through us, and beyond us. Perhaps what we call a being is, in fact, a temporary gathering of relationships - a meeting place where countless forms of life and experience come together.

There are, as Lewis Thomas suggested, no solitary beings.

And perhaps the artwork is simply an invitation to pause with that thought:

What if we are not separate beings who occasionally connect?

What if we are, from the beginning, inter-beings?