The town of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is famous for its oysters, its beaches and its Interdependence Day parade. The parade takes place on the Fourth of July as neighboring Cape Cod towns are hosting their own celebrations, but only in Wellfleet is the notion of independence scrapped for the higher ideal of interdependence. It seems to me, especially given a recent turn of fortune that has put me on crutches, we could all use a little more acknowledgment of our interdependence.
A Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh called it “interbeing,” this profound connection we have with one another’s actions, words and thoughts. It’s not intentional, it’s a given. The Chilean butterfly flapping its wings stirs the sails of the boat on Hudson Bay. Indra’s net, is a more familiar term. It’s the weave of energy that binds all phenomena. It’s invisible to many, though some of us have seen it. I have, and it’s stretchy and springy like a spiderweb. It fills a room, yet it cannot be perceived through touch.
Why bother with this? Why write about it? Because our minds understand us incorrectly when they understand us as being, acting and thinking alone. When a man pulls out a gun and starts shooting, he blasts a hole in the net, in the fabric, and trust and innocence slip through and seem to disappear. This might be an adequate definition of that ever-popular word “trauma”: The tearing of the fabric of trust that binds us.
But what can be rent can be sewn. This is the healing part of the equation. Recognizing the connection we have to the community of all things is, in Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “Like a drop of water trusting the river.” The man with the gun is part of that river, too. He’s the one who expresses the vitriol and self-hatred we all carry. He’s not outside us, he’s inside us, and he’s sharing with us the torn fabric of his life.
What’s torn in my life right now has a name: the Achilles’ tendon. Don’t ask, but yes, I did it playing Pickleball, a game invented for the older generation, I was told, though I saw no evidence of that on the court. Burly people stood in close proximity across a net and slammed a wiffle ball at one another’s heads and bodies. We could have been gladiators in the Roman Colosseum where the crowd-pleasing matches ended in death—or in my case, a limp off the court and a trip to the Emergency Room for confirmation that the largest tendon in my body was no longer in one piece. What about interbeing, I wondered, when calf muscle and heel ceased talking to one another? When leg and foot, such cooperative comrades in the fine art of walking, finally went their separate ways?
The story goes that the goddess Thetis, who gave birth to Achilles, exercised her motherly love by dipping her mortal son in the river Styx to make him invulnerable. This dipping wasn’t foolproof—she had to hold him by the heel—and that was where a mother’s love failed him. Prince Paris, the bad boy responsible for starting the Trojan War, shot Achilles in the heel with a poisoned arrow and that was the end of him. But our hero found immortality after all, thanks to his heel and the metaphor that goes with it.
The story of Achilles teaches about weakness in spite of overall strength, but I see it differently. I see our strength arising from our weakness, our vulnerability. I see our vulnerability giving rise to our strength. There’s a new openness in me these days. In the two weeks since I became injured, I’ve become noticeably more vulnerable. I cry more easily, I take almost nothing for granted. Too often I think about my next injury. Right now I’m away from home but surrounded by family. They carry things for me, they cook, they take me to surgery and home again and assure me I can sit out this summer because there will be others. Dozens of friends in Arizona have offered to sweep and shop and drive for me when I return.
There’s a world of difference in sitting still. I feel my injury knitting up, the rules of interbeing at work in my body as well as my mind. I can’t say too much about this because it doesn’t form easily into words, but I feel the span of my life, its arc toward closing, and instead of filling me with fear this feels right and good to me. There’s a deep satisfaction and yes, a sense of interdependence. The fawn hopping through the field looking for its mama is at the beginning, and I am a good long way below the curve at the top, but the arc is the same, the arc is shared. All along that arc we have each other’s company, like it or not. Drops of water learning to trust the river. A butterfly flexing its wings to fill the belly of a sail.
