As I gradually let my focus drift more and more shallowly towards the mirrored image of my body exposed to nature, I feel the vibrating of nature's hum echo in my ears again. I smell the cold burnt air and feel the light warm on my face. This bathroom I am standing in, it is not nature, right? Porcelain is not nature. Metal faucets are not nature. Nature is chaotic and complex, I breathe and it breathes with me. Maybe it is the Earth itself that is alive; maybe it is a giant organism with a pulse and maybe we're just its cells. Maybe if we go along with the needs and desires of that organism we can go slipsliding down its blood vessels, carried by the currents. Maybe we are the currents, flowing over rocks, not letting the rocks stop us but not jumping over them, just flowing over them, acknowledging with a polite nod their presence and then moving on. Maybe if we treated the Earth as something alive that needs to be kept healthy we would understand its beauty.

The problem is that you can't come up with anything new. Everytime I think of something, like the Earth maybe being alive, somebody else comes along and tells me who thought it first and what they called it. This one is the "Gaia hypothesis," and it basically says that the Earth can be seen as a single living organism in homeostasis, where life affects climate and climate affects life. So what about humans? Where do we fall in the giant balance of the universe? Oh, I'm going to have a bitch of a headache tomorrow. >