Much of the time when a thing is said to be invisible, our first impulse is to therefore doubt its existence. This is, in my opinion, good honest skepticism, because most of the time, particularly on the internet, when something is said to be invisible it actually does not exist. Enough said. There are, however, a large category of things and phenomena which are invisible, but which do exist. In fact, almost the entirety of the universe is invisible to our unaided sight and other senses. What we can sense is only the thinnest slice of the worlds around us. For a thing can be real, yet invisible, in a many ways: it can be moving too fast, like a fired bullet; too slow, like history; it can be too small, like an atom; or too big, like the solar system; too close, like the inside of my eyelid; or too far away, like a pulsar. It can be too dense, like the inside of a rock; or to fine, like an emotion. Things can be invisible because they are too unfamiliar and different, and invisible because they are too familiar and have become part of our habitual mental landscape.
Even if you include all the senses, you quickly realize that we can sense only a small part of our world — and cannot actually see some of the most important aspects of it: all the way from the enormous planet beneath us, through the cells of our body, to our emotions and thoughts and to the social entities that we ourselves compose. Have you ever seen the United States? Where does it exist, actually? Confirming the existence of things unseen is probably the most ever-present challenge that we face. What is she feeling about me? What am I really feeling about her, for that matter? Are they telling us the whole story in the news media? What’s really going on here? We live in a world of continual supposition and guesswork. We are asked to believe vast amounts about invisible things that we simply take from other people. Why somebody did something, why political events occur, the nature of those twinkling lights that we call stars, and the fantastic, complex yet invisible world inside ourselves. What we “know” about these things is mostly what we have been told about them.
In the midst of this ocean of the invisible there are traces, or clues to many amazing things. Today I would like to pursue clues to something that is invisible for interesting reasons. This may sound almost like a riddle. Here goes: it is invisible because we are only tiny parts of it: it’s far too big for us to see. Yet it is also all around us. We cannot see it because it is too familiar and we cannot see it because it is too unfamiliar.
Now what could this possibly be? I will not leave you hanging, for I have come to understand that the whole of Nature is a living being — not just a complex combination of living beings, not only an integrated system, as some scientists have come to believe, but an actual living being, with mind on its own level. One might ask: “Why isn’t this obvious? Why has it not been known for a long time? If it is alive, and we are in the middle of it, it should be pretty obvious.” To begin with, many people from an Indigenous or Native culture would not be in such ignorance. For people in our culture, this is why I went through some of the many ways that a thing can be invisible. I hope to shake up the familiar known that surrounds us. This being of Earth is certainly too big for any of us to see all at once. Walking in any woods, or even looking from a mountain top, we can see but a few miles at most. It moves too slowly for us to realize what it is doing. It may seem in some ways so familiar to us in our emotions that we take it for granted. Yet the idea of Nature as a living being is also shockingly unfamiliar.
Let us start with the familiarity. We all depend on the atmosphere for every breath we take, and although we were told in grade school, we forget that the air, which we cannot see, is an intricate,constantly balanced system that spans the whole globe and all the oceans. It supports us continually, yet we generally take it completely for granted. Some even imagine that we have complete independence from Earth. We breathe every 3 seconds yet scarcely notice it: it is too familiar.
It is hard to pick up a handful of soil and make a case to most people that it contains a whole universe of organisms in a vast web of interconnections and balances. That it may even be part of the living body of Nature. Dirt is already defined in our culture: it’s dirty. Granted that this vast world is also invisible because its individual inhabitants are mostly too small to see, yet this world is well concealed behind a common, dismissive definition. We walk on it everyday, and we are mostly concerned with washing it off our clothes.
It begins to be clear that there are not only physical causes of invisibility but also cultural attitudes. I have read about the soil for some time and know about its amazing contents, yet I still mostly feel that dirt is dirty. How often do I register the air that I breathe, or become aware of the turning Earth beneath my feet? We are blinded by familiarity. If all of these cultural attitudes and familiarities could be removed at a single stroke, we would stand rubbing our eyes, straining in the brilliance of a new and unfamiliar world.