a great coauthorship

 

Each of us has had many authors, 

and each of us is engaged, 

for better or worse, in that same authorship. 

We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship 

in which we are collaborating with God and nature

 in the making of ourselves and one another. 

From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly,

 or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate

 is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product.

The business of humanity is undoubtedly survival in this complex sense —

 a necessary, difficult, and entirely fascinating job of work. We have in us

 deeply planted instructions — personal, cultural, and natural — to survive, 

and we do not need much experience to inform us that we cannot survive alone. 

The smallest possible “survival unit,” indeed, appears to be the universe… 

Inside it, everything happens in concert; not a breath is drawn but by the grace

 of an inconceivable series of vital connections joining an inconceivable multiplicity

 of created things in an inconceivable unity. 

it may be that our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods,

 and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites 

by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe… 

They give the word “love” its only chance to mean, 

for only they can give it a history,

 a community, and a place. 

 in such ways can love become flesh

 and do its worldly work.

It is  in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth;

 it is to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us

 that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… 

Separate from the relationships,

 there is nobody to be known.

~ Wendell Berry

taken from  The Art of the Commonplace

art: Share in the wonder of the Shared Sky exhibition | by Stuart Buchanan

with thanks to The Marginalian by Maria Popova