The Matryoshka Model
Life within life.
Microbes live within you.
You live within a family.
The family lives within a habitat.
The habitat lives within the Earth.
The Earth lives within the cosmos.
Every host is hosted.
Each thing is a whole in itself, while also belonging to something larger.
Where do you end?
At your skin?
The air outside you becomes the air inside your lungs.
Water becomes blood.
Food becomes body.
Sunlight becomes energy.
Your boundary is real, but it is not a wall.
Your habitat is part of the larger body keeping you alive.
Distinction is not separation.
A person is not a tree.
A river is not a forest.
The distinctions are useful.
But usefulness does not mean independence.
Everything exists through relationship.
The boundary is useful.
The relationship is deeper.
Wholes within wholes.
Inside a person are organs, cells, microbes and countless living processes.
Yet we call the whole thing one human being.
Look outward and the same pattern continues:
Person.
Family.
Community.
Ecosystem.
Planet.
Wholes within wholes.
Life within life.
What contains the largest doll?
Follow the pattern outward far enough and eventually you reach the question:
What is the whole thing?
Symbiotika uses the word God for that whole.
Not something separate from reality.
The whole of reality itself.
The larger body.
Earth is not simply the stage on which life happens.
It is the larger living system we exist within.
We are not visitors to nature.
We are something nature is doing.
What do you belong to?
We spend much of our lives asking:
What belongs to me?
The Matryoshka asks a different question:
What do I belong to?
A family.
A place.
A living planet.
A greater whole.
Symbiosis begins by remembering the relationship.
Every host is hosted.
Every whole belongs to a greater whole.