Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this:
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.
He called the relationship between the cloud and the paper “interbeing.” The paper and the cloud “inter-are”
The quote implies that if you are not a poet, you will not see this clearly. Fortunately, you do not have to write poetry to be a poet. All you have to do is see like a poet. How do you see like a poet? I think you open yourself to life and pretend.
It’s a classic case of “Fake it till you make it.” To see a flower like a poet, you look at a flower and ask yourself, “If I was a poet, how would I see this flower?” or, “If I described this flower like a poet, what would I say?” This is obviously not “pretending” in the same way that we might pretend to be a wizard. (What, you’ve never pretended to be a wizard?) We imagine ourselves in the role of a poet, so that we can become a poet, whether we write anything down or not. It’s actually a pretty small step. Even language can get in the way of the simplicity.
To go a layer deeper, you might think about what makes the flower possible. Can you see the rain that helped nourish the flower to life? Can you see the cloud from which the rain fell?
More from Thich Nhat Hanh:
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
Where are we in this particular idea of interbeing? Can we hold the paper and see ourselves in it? It is possible. Thich Nhat Hanh explains:
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.
Everything really IS one.
Here are a few links, if you’d like to explore more.