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You Are the Land
What are you physically made of?
Every time you breathe in, your lungs transfer the air’s oxygen into your bloodstream. Your red blood cells trade it out for carbon dioxide. When you breathe out, that carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere. It finds its way to the leaves of plants. They take it in and exhale oxygen, which completes the cycle by returning to your lungs. The molecules they produce become part of your body. The molecules you produce become part of theirs.
When you drink water, it enters your cells, replenishing the moisture lost through sweat and saliva. When you eat, the molecules in the food are used to construct new cells and chemically reacted into the energy that animates you. And your food, in turn, is made of soil and sunlight by way of crops— along with the CO2 that you breathe out, of course.
You are literally, physically composed of the landscape. Your body is part of the local water cycle, the patterns of air, and the chemical transformation of the raw material of dirt into organic matter: first plants, then your animal body.
You are not a burden on the land. You are part of it. Humanity is a geological formation, an outcropping of soil. Wherever you go, if you breathe, if you drink, if you eat, you have given something of yourself to the land. Some of it, in turn, has rebuilt part of you.