The World Is Made of Relatives
Every day on the Camino I passed cows.
In Galicia especially, they were everywhere. Behind stone walls. In wet grass. Watching the pilgrims move past with the patience of beings who had seen humans come and go long before any of us arrived with backpacks and walking sticks and complicated ideas about the sacred.
Every time I saw them, I sent the same message.
“There are cows who are free. There are cows who live in sanctuaries. There are cows who choose their companions. There are cows who get to keep their babies. Never stop thinking of your freedom. Spread the word.”
I knew they didn’t understand English or Spanish. I knew the message was, by any reasonable measure, absurd. I sent it anyway hoping something of the meaning might carry across. If not through language, through something older. Mammal to mammal. Body to body. The older grammar of attention. Energetics, telepathy.
By the end of the Camino I was no longer certain I was the one doing the speaking. Something was happening in those moments of contact that I didn’t have a frame for. Something that the word empathy couldn’t hold. Something that kinship pointed toward but didn’t reach. I stood at the edge of a field, looking at a cow who was looking back at me, and felt the ground shift in a way I still don’t fully have language for.
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We have a way of speaking about connection between species as though it were something we build. A bridge, perhaps. Humans on one side. Animals on the other. The work is learning how to cross.
But a bridge implies two shores. And I have begun to wonder whether the shores were ever separate to begin with. The deeper question the one that opened in that field in Galicia is not whether animals are like us. It is whether the distinction between us was ever the deepest thing. Whether the categories we have built: human, animal, individual, other, are primary facts of reality, or whether they are more like shorelines: visible from a distance, constantly redrawn, and never quite as fixed as they appear.
Beneath species, something else moves. Migration. Belonging. Grief. Curiosity. The desire for companionship. The impulse to protect. The longing for home. Life returns to these themes obsessively, exploring them through different bodies. A monarch butterfly navigates across continents by a logic no individual butterfly was taught. A salmon finds its way back to the exact tributary where it was born. An elephant keeps vigil beside her dead. A human builds a cemetery.
We have different words for the same movement. One grammar calls it instinct. Another calls it pilgrimage. One calls it animal behavior. Another calls it mourning.
Perhaps both names point at the same movement, seen from different distances. What if the universe is not made of things that then relate to each other? What if it is, at its most fundamental level, a continuous act of relating and the things that appear to exist are what that relating looks like when it becomes briefly local, briefly particular, briefly named?
Gravity itself as the cosmos’s oldest habit of gathering. The force that pulls dust into stars, stars into galaxies, and bodies toward one another. The tendency of separate things to find themselves in relationship.
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If that is true, if relationship is not something that happens between beings but the ground from which beings emerge then every individual is something stranger than we thought..
The body, then, is not a boundary between self and world. It is an organ of participation. An instrument the universe built, over billions of years of increasing complexity, so that it could explore what it is like to be this, this specific configuration, this particular question the cosmos is asking of itself through the brief fact of your existence.
A whale asks the ocean what depth is. A crow asks the city what intelligence is.
A cow in a field in Galicia asks the grass what patience is.
A human on a pilgrimage asks: what? Something about home. Something about meaning. Something about why we keep moving toward things we cannot fully name.
The bodies differ. The inquiry is the same. And the inquiry did not begin with any of us.
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This is where extinction becomes something other than an environmental problem. When a species disappears, we lose a population. We lose a node in the ecosystem. We lose genetic material, evolutionary heritage, ecological function. These losses are real and they are enormous.
But there is another loss that our language barely touches. We lose a question.
We lose the particular way that configuration of life was exploring what it means to exist. The passenger pigeon did not only occupy a niche in the eastern forests of North America. It was asking something through its body, its migrations, its darkening of the sky in numbers we can now barely imagine. It was asking something about what abundance is, about what it means to move together in such numbers that you become, briefly, a kind of weather.
That question is gone. Gone. The universe lost a sense organ. It became, in some small way, less able to perceive itself.
And we felt it. We feel it still. People mourn species they have never seen. Forests they have never visited. Birds whose names they do not know. We explain this as empathy, or ecological grief, or an evolved attachment to biodiversity.
But I think something more precise is happening. I think grief is one of the ways the relational field registers its own ruptures. As an actual event in the structure of what is. When relationship is severed, when a node in the web of becoming-toward goes permanently silent, something in the web responds. And if that web has, through the long improbable work of evolution, produced nodes capable of conscious feeling, then that response arrives as grief.
You are not separate from the universe, mourning at it. You are the universe, having finally learned how to mourn itself.
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There is a comfort available here that I want to name carefully, because it can become a way of escaping the very thing I’m trying to say.
The comfort goes like this: everything returns to circulation. The body of the leaf becomes the hunger of the worm becomes the mineral in the soil becomes the cell wall of the new root. Nothing is truly lost. The patterns persist. The material is generous.
This is true. Compost is real. Return to circulation is real. But before the leaf becomes soil, it was this leaf. The exact configuration of cells. The particular angle at which it caught light on a specific afternoon in October. The precise relationship it had with the branch it grew from. That is gone. What returns is its material. What returns is its chemical generosity. But this, this unrepeatable particular, dissolves.
And that matters. That has to matter. Or the cosmology becomes a way of making peace with loss too quickly. A way of saying it all returns as a method of not fully feeling that this is gone.
The tension I want to hand you and I do not want to resolve it is this: The universe is a circulation. And every node in that circulation is irreplaceable. Both. Fully. Without resolution.
The grief that comes from holding both simultaneously is not a problem in your thinking. It is accurate perception. It is what it actually feels like to see clearly.
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Perhaps this is why I keep returning to ancestry. Because ancestry keeps dissolving the boundaries of who “I” turns out to be. First my parents. Then my grandparents. Then villages. Then migrations. Then ecosystems. Then species. Then something even larger.
The farther back I travel, the less I encounter individuals and the more I encounter relationships. At some point the distinction begins to collapse.
The whale is not separate from the ocean. The forest is not separate from the soil. The fungus is not separate from the tree. And I am not separate from the world that made me.
Perhaps nothing ever was. Perhaps what we call beings are temporary concentrations of relationship, briefly taking shape, briefly becoming visible, before returning to the larger circulation from which they emerged.
If this is true, then grief begins to look different. No longer as a response to termination, but a response to transformation. While sometimes we think it’s the response to a relationship that has ended, I’m beginning to consider it’s the recognition that relationship continues in a form we do not yet know how to hold.
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Which brings me back to the cow in the field. To the moment of reaching. To the absurd message sent in a language she couldn’t understand. I have thought a great deal about what I was doing in those moments. And I have come to believe it was not primarily about the cow, not about her receiving something, understanding something, being changed by something. It may have been doing something else entirely.
It may have been an act of witness. Witness is not the same as observation. Observation is what you do when you are outside a thing, recording it. Witness is what happens when you allow a thing to land on you. When you let its reality enter you and change the shape of what you are, even slightly, even temporarily.
The cow in the field was not a symbol. She was not a representative of Animal Agriculture or Ecological Crisis or Human Hubris. She was a specific being, warm, particular, with her own hunger, her own relationships I would never know. I thought about the cows at sanctuaries back home, the ones with friends, the ones whose names I knew. And in the moment of sending that ridiculous message, I was refusing to let her pass through my field of vision as scenery. I was insisting to myself, to whatever larger field I was part of that she was here. That this was happening. That a being was standing in the rain in Galicia and her life was occurring, fully, regardless of whether any human noticed.
Witness changes the relational field. While witnessing does not save anything, it does not stop the truck. It does insist on the reality of relationship where every surrounding system is organized to deny it.
The thing that is seen is in relationship with the one who sees it. And relationship, even brief, even asymmetrical, even silent, even absurd, is real. It happened. It cannot be made not to have happened.
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Consider what the universe built, to arrive at witness.
Fourteen billion years of increasing complexity. Stars that had to explode so that heavier elements could exist. Planets that had to cool. Oceans that had to form. Single cells that had to spend two billion years learning to cooperate before anything more complex became possible. The improbable accumulation of every extinction and adaptation and lucky mutation that eventually produced, among other things, the nervous system capable of standing in a field in Galicia and feeling the weight of a cow’s gaze.
Stars explode and no one mourns.
Continents drift and no one marks the passing.
Species vanish in the dark and the dark says nothing.
And then, after all of that, after all that time and all that dying and all that patient complexification, matter organizes itself into something that weeps. That lights candles. That builds cairns. That writes the names of the lost. That stands at the edge of an empty habitat and feels, in the body, the specific gravity of an absence.
You are not separate from the universe, grieving at it.
You are the universe, having finally learned how to grieve itself.
And the grief is not a malfunction. It is not evidence of weakness or over-sensitivity or a failure to accept reality. It is the function. It is what the whole long project of consciousness was building toward: the capacity to feel the weight of what is lost. To register rupture in the relational field not just structurally but actually, in a body, in a chest, at three in the morning when the enormity of it arrives without warning.
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The question this leaves is not whether you can save everything. You cannot. The passenger pigeon is gone. Some of what is being lost right now will not be recovered. The truck will come. The fence will hold. The machinery is enormous and you are one person and the gap between the scale of the problem and the scale of what any individual can do is not a gap you can think your way across.
The question is whether each rupture, each specific loss, each individual animal, each particular forest will pass through the world witnessed or unwitnessed.
And that difference is not nothing.
Because witness is not passive. The relational field is changed by it. The cow who was seen by a human on a pilgrimage, who was sent a ridiculous message in a language she couldn’t understand, who was for one moment the full object of another being’s attention and care, that cow existed in a different universe than the cow who passed by unnoticed. Not a better universe, necessarily, or a safer one for the cow, but a different one. One in which relationship had occurred across the distance of species, across the distance of language, across every system organized to prevent exactly that.
The reaching happened. And a cosmos in which that reaching happened is different from a cosmos in which it did not.
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By the end of the Camino, I was no longer sure the cows needed my messages.
What I was beginning to understand is that I needed to send them because the act of reaching across species, across the grammar of use and ownership, across all the fences we have built between ourselves and the rest of life is one of the few ways I know to remember what I actually am. (Not just a human who feels connected to animals.)
A temporary site where the universe is briefly capable of recognizing itself in another form. A creature that has, through the long accident of evolution and the shorter accident of a particular life, developed the capacity to feel the weight of other lives. To mourn them. To reach toward them. To insist against every system that says otherwise that their existence matters not because of what they provide, but because they are here, participating in the same improbable unfolding, asking their own questions through their own bodies, for their own reasons.
The world is not made of resources.
It is made of relatives.
And every now and then, if you are paying attention, if you let yourself stand at the edge of a field in the rain and actually look, you remember that you belong to it as one of its more recently arrived, and perhaps most bewildered, expressions.
Reaching toward the others. Hoping something carries across.
Michelle Carrera is a Puerto Rican writer, grief worker, death doula, and cultural witness exploring grief, ancestry, ecology, spirituality, and belonging in a changing world. Their work has appeared in various publications and can also be found through Grief and Liberation.
Grief and Liberation is a creative ecosystem devoted to grief, pilgrimage, ecology, ancestry, spirituality, animals, and the search for aliveness in fractured times. Through essays, stories, and reflections, it asks how we remain open-hearted in a world marked by loss and transformation. www.griefandliberation.com