One of my cats was asleep and I reached over to smell her. I felt the warm air that was coming out of her nose coming in through my nose, warming the skin of my upper lip. I felt as though at that moment both mine and my cat's bodies were a single one, a single living tunnel system containing the same air, held by the same air, being made possible by the same air. I wondered if there could be a more intimate contact than that of the air that filled other lungs moving to fill mine, being drawn to me by the pull of my breath, by the movement of muscles responding to an invisible force, a force I don't have to control. Like an object being pulled to the ground by the force of gravity, my cat's breath fell into my lungs.

Feeling that made me aware that the air makes both my body and my cat's body a single body, just as together we are a single body with my other cat, with the ferns and anthuriums and philodendrons I have at home, with the humans I know and those I don't know, with the whales, bats, dogs and blackbirds. The air of other beings falls into my lungs, as if by gravitational pull, with each inhalation. The pull of my breath makes me one with all that lives and has lived. Now I know that we have always been one single body that transforms and breathes the same air with different rhythms in different lungs. We have been different ways that the Earth has invented to say "this is how it feels like to be me".

Many times I have wanted to find the edges of my body, to find them and follow them with my eyes as if they were a line drawn with a pencil, or as if they were borders on a map that help me to say yes, this is me, here I begin, here I end, everything that is within this border I recognize and it is because of this border that I am not a fern, a whale or a blackbird.

Many times I have wanted to dissolve those edges, to erase them or to discover that there is no need to erase anything because they don't exist, and what I have seen those times —the line, the border— has been a distortion or a mirage.

My borders have also dissolved with those of the house I grew up in. In that house's backyard there were hens, ducks, rabbits and guinea pigs, and, for a while, there were also geese and a fighting rooster that I was very much afraid of. They were some of the first others I was able to have conversations with, despite our edges. The rooster and the geese were not in the backyard at the same time, but in my mind that whole backyard is atemporal.

In my memory everything happens in the same place and at the same time: the animals, the guava tree, the lemon tree, the feijoa tree, the gooseberry bush, the water hose with which my grandmother watered the plants, the walls that separated me from other houses, the edges of the house. But in that house the edges also dissolved. Everything was a single body. Nothing began nowhere. Everything had always been together and forever would be.

It was in that backyard that I climbed a tree for the first time. It was a tree that made sweet guavas, pink on the inside, which my grandmother used for making juice. I wish I had a more precise memory of the tree and the guavas and how they tasted, because I'm sure my body still carries some molecules from those guavas.

I learned I could climb that tree while carrying a cushion from the living room furniture so I could be more comfortable in the branches and stay longer without feeling pain in my bones. I was skinny and my bones were - as my friends' mothers often told me - very "exposed". It was possible that, because of the times I climbed without a cushion, my bones were a little bit marked by the branches of the tree. Maybe the branches of the tree also adopted the shape of my bones a bit. As I climbed that tree, the pull of my inhalation made the air created by its leaves fall into my lungs, so we were one single body. We still are, although I don't know if he still exists as a tree. I sure hope so.

From those branches I would look out over the backyard while tearing off little pieces of thin, soft, crunchy bark. I would let them fall to the ground and then I knew nothing more about them, because I don't remember ever taking a second to look at them after their fall. They were probably eaten by the hens and the ducks, or maybe they decomposed and were eaten by the bugs in the soil.

I don't remember much about the ducks and I don't remember the soil bugs at all, but the hens left me a number of memories. Two intense ones: one horrible and one beautiful. The first one is in a bathroom downstairs in the house, where I went in to pee and couldn't because I found a dead hen, hanging by one leg, tied to a faucet in the shower. I don't know if there was blood. Maybe there was blood and my memory wanted to give me the gift of removing it. The second is in the backyard, where I went to see them going to sleep at the wrong time, confused by the change of light caused by a solar eclipse. I remember them perched on the horizontal bars of a structure that I think my grandfather built, I don't know if originally for them, but it was already theirs. I think I remember seeing them from below, all round, orange, fluffy. I don't know if that moment had so much detail. Maybe not, and my memory wanted to give me the gift of putting them in.

Note that I said "the first memory is", “the second memory is". They are memories of things from the past, but as memories they are always in present tense, because time is always the present. My present self is always one with my past self. My present self, through the air that makes the edges irrelevant, is always one with all the forms the Earth has had throughout all of history to say "this is what it feels like to be me". All the whales in history. All the blackbirds in history. All the flies in history.

To think of the past as being separate from the present is a mirage; a distortion of edges. 

We, ‘western’ humans, see time as a line that starts at one point and projects forward, until it ends. Some indigenous communities, on the other hand, understand time as an eternal and recurring cycle of events, and their languages lack terms for past and future. Everything is present. 

We, ‘western’ humans, have a word for time and a word for space. Time is a line and space is a plane and, since they are different words, then they are things—according to us—that can exist independently. We live in a plane which is space, and we measure life according to a line which is time. We live sliced.

According to the interpretations of linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Hopi have no separable notions of time and space, but they do have a distinction between two forms of existence, which could be understood as the manifested and the Manifesting.  

The manifested is all that is or has been accessible to our senses, without differentiating between present and past but excluding all that we would call future. Manifesting is everything we call future, but it would also include everything we call mental: that which appears or exists in the mind or in the heart, which according to the Hopi would not only be the human heart, but also, as Whorf explains, "the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature, in the heart of nature herself".

The manifested is all that is evident to our senses. For me: the edges of my body, the whales, the dogs, the blackbirds, the houses, the guavas, the hens. The Manifesting is all that is not explicit, that is not present to the senses, that is intangible. For me: the pain of not knowing how it feels to be a fly, the question of whether there is a more intimate contact than being one single body through air, the memories of the guava tree and the hens, which were also evident to my senses, and so they changed me forever. They stayed in my body. Manifested. Manifesting.

The word origin comes from latin, from the verb oriri, which means to be born, to rise, to emerge, to appear. Oriri wasn’t a verb exclusively for living beings. It was understood that things can also be born and that the sun is born every day. To ask ourselves about origins is to ask ourselves about birth: about the moment in which a body appears in the world as something apparently independent, something with its own edges.

I wasn’t born a fly or a broadleaf plantain. The edges of my manifested body have a human shape, even if they often dissolve with what Manifesting, like my question about how it feels to be a fly and how it feels to be a broadleaf plantain, so, somehow, I am reborn each time I imagine myself a fly and a broadleaf plantain. If time is not a line and only the present exists, then I (with these edges) was born, yes, but mostly I am born. As we are born—cats, anthuriums, whales, dogs, blackbirds, flies, trees, hens—we give birth to new edges of the body of the Earth. Manifested. Manifesting.

I breathe and feel the cold air coming in through my nose. The pull of my breath reminds me again that, although I see my edges, I am also one with all that lives and has lived. Everything is one single body. The edges are mirages. Nothing begins nowhere. All is together since forever and forever will be. We are one single body that transforms and breathes the same air with different rhythms in different lungs. We are all different forms the Earth has originated to say “this is how it feels like to be me”.