There is No Distance Between Us

This morning I was looking at pictures of the latest floods in Texas when something hit me like a punch to the side of the head. Not a thought exactly—thoughts are too polite, too cerebral for what this was. This was a knowing, bone-deep and undeniable, the way you know fire burns before your brain catches up, calls you a fuckwit, and pulls your hand away.

Floodwater rippling across a tiled floor. The boundary between surface and depth disappears, leaving only motion and reflection.

There is no distance.

The phrase arrived complete, carrying its own weight of certainty. There is no distance between us. There is no distance between myself and the life forms around me. There is no distance between myself and the spirit realm. There is no distance between my past, current, and future self. And there is no distance between the experience, joy and suffering of others.

I sat there staring at the screen, watching muddy water swirl through someone else's kitchen, and felt something fundamental shift in my understanding of how the world actually works.

The Knowing Body

The thing about visceral spiritual experiences is they don't ask permission. They arrive like weather - undeniable, elemental and completely indifferent to whether you're ready or not. That day, mourning for the people confronted with such extraordinary flood damage thousands of miles away, my body understood something my mind had been circling around for years without quite grasping.

Distance, I realized, is a construct our consciousnesses create to navigate complexity. It's useful fiction, like money or national borders—real in its effects but manufactured in its nature. When I stood at that abandoned house years ago, my first real experience of urban animism and watching life explode in the courtyard beyond the mesh-covered garage, I wasn't separate from what I was seeing. The boundary between observer and observed, between self and spirit of place, was far more porous than I'd understood.

The floods in Texas weren't happening "over there" to "other people." In that moment of knowing, the separation collapsed. The grief was mine, the water was mine, the resilience emerging in the aftermath was mine. Not because I claimed it, but because the distance that would make it not mine was revealed as illusion.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting every living soul has been brain washed by some conspiracy to make us think we’re all separate (OK, well I kinda do but for different reasons in a different context). What I mean is that our consciousness is inherently limited to what our physical selves can cope with. No distance, in effect, is the greater truth that we live within, originated from and will return too.

Living With No Distance Between Us

This changes things for me, in ways both subtle and profound. When there's truly no distance between you and the spirits of the places you move through, every step becomes potential conversation. The corner shop isn't just where you buy milk—it's a being with its own history, its own accumulated memories of all the interactions it has witnessed. The bus stop becomes a gathering point not just for people but for the unseen lives that populate our urban landscapes.

I find myself pausing more, the way I used to pause at that wild courtyard. Not because I'm trying to be mindful—that word feels too intentional for what this is—but because recognition creates its own rhythm. When you know the tree outside your window as a living being rather than scenery that isn’t apart from you, you naturally slow down enough to acknowledge it. When you understand your past and future selves as equally present, decisions stop being about safeguarding a distinct version of yourself and start being about honoring the whole story arc you're part of.

The practical implications are both mundane and revolutionary. Grocery shopping becomes an act of relationship with the land that grew the food, the hands that picked it, the systems that brought it to you. Dealing with difficult people becomes easier when you remember there's no distance between their pain and yours—not because you have to fix them, but because the separation that makes them other loses its grip.

The Mycelial Web

When I try to visualize this knowing, I think of mushrooms. And no, not ‘shrooms, although a shroom or two might help bed these ideas down. I mean mycelium—those vast fungal networks threading through forest floors, connecting separate bits of fungus into one breathing organism. You can't see the connections from the surface, but they're absolutely real, carrying nutrients and information across what looks like empty space.

That’s what seeing those floods showed me: not that we’re all connected in some abstract sense, but that the connections have always been there, running beneath the surface of our constructed separations. The question isn’t how to create connection, but how to recognize what’s already alive and flowing between us.

Mycelium threads weaving through soil — the hidden network that makes relationship possible.

Although a profound realisation for me, I’m not trying to spiritually gas light anyone. Perceived space between ourselves and others is real in its effects—isolation hurts, loss cuts deep, conflict creates genuine friction. These elements of our lives are real and need to be attended too. But underneath these surface realities runs something deeper, the substrate that makes relationship possible in the first place. The same awareness that makes grief possible also makes healing possible. The same interconnection that allows pain to travel between us also allows love to travel.

Not a Teaching, a Recognition

I'm not writing this to convince anyone of anything. If you're more well travelled on your path than me (or less obtuse), you're probably already well aware of what I'm saying. Maybe you recognize this knowing when you encounter it or you don't, both responses are valid. Some people seem to live naturally in this awareness—often the ones who've never lost their childhood sense that everything is alive and responsive. Others, like me, spend years building elaborate (and sometimes wobbly) philosophical frameworks only to have them collapse in a moment of direct encounter with how things actually are.

What I can say is that once you feel it—that punch to the head certainty that distance is constructed rather than fundamental—it's hard to unfeel. The knowing stays in your body even when your mind tries to return to familiar patterns of separation. And gradually, almost without noticing, you start moving through the world differently.

You begin to understand why indigenous peoples speak of the land as family rather than property. You recognize why animistic traditions treat places as persons deserving respect rather than resources to be managed. You start to glimpse what the mystics were pointing toward when they spoke of union—not some special altered state, but the ordinary miracle of what's always been true.

The floods in Texas are still real and the damage is devastating. The need for practical response is still urgent. The grief families are experiencing is definitely real and present. But I hope that next time I experience loss, I hold my grief a little differently, knowing that my mourning is shared, and the pain is for the immediate absence of what is gone, not an enduring pain of something forever lost. This response, I think, emerges from collective wisdom rather than individual feelings of being overwhelmed, and the resilience draws from the same inexhaustible source that pushes green life through sidewalk cracks.

There is no distance. Not as philosophy, not as aspiration, but as the actual ground of being, as close as breath, as immediate as the next heartbeat.

Living from Here

So what does it mean to live from this recognition? How do I move through a world organized around separation when I know, in my bones, that the separation is a result of limited sensing not an actual truth?

Carefully. Gently. With enormous respect for how necessary our illusions of distance can be. The person cut off in traffic may be part of the same mycelial web, but they still need you to brake in time. The difficult colleague may be sharing the same fundamental being, but boundaries are still necessary and healthy. Recognition of no distance doesn't collapse all differences, it will just reveal them as surface variations in a deeper unity.

I find myself more patient and more decisive, more willing to feel others' pain and more able to act from clarity rather than reactivity. When you know there's no distance between your past and future selves, you make different choices—ones that hopefully honour the whole timeline rather than just the immediate moment. When you understand the spirits of places as real beings deserving respect, you move more thoughtfully through urban landscapes that most people experience as dead space.

This isn't about becoming a better person or achieving some spiritual state. It's about aligning how you live with what you know to be true, allowing the visceral recognition of interconnection to inform the practical business of being human. The knowing does the work. Your job is simply to trust it, to let it reshape your movements through the world one small recognition at a time.

The Texas floods will keep happening, in Texas and everywhere else that water needs to go. The grief will keep arising, and so will the resilience. But maybe, when the next wave of knowing hits—that not-so-subtle punch to the head reminder of what's always been true—we'll be a little more ready to let it change us, to let it show us how to live as what we actually are: temporary expressions of one vast, breathing, interconnected life that has never been separate from itself.