I am a pollinator 🐝 and other simultaneous frames of identity reference

Last weekend after climbing in the greenbelt, my legs were covered in burrs—sticky seeds from month of good rain’s overgrowth. “I’m a pollinator”, I thought. A simple self-evident truth that nevertheless de-centered my identity in a pleasantly transcendent way.

I like to think of myself as a person. But that’s what I am relative to me. Relative to plants; I’m transit for their procreation. That’s what I am. It’s a perfectly true and valid construction of the Jordaning-process. For them, that’s what distinguishes me from some other, and makes me consistent. Weird huh? Relative to you I might be a friend, symbol, writer. To Agent Smith in the Matrix, I’m a virus. The thing that struck me: None of these things negate each other. They have always coexisted; they’ll continue to coexist whether or not I’m aware of them, like them, or choose them.

I act as if my ego-identity is exclusive. But I am infinite other equally valid identity-constructions simultaneously. Feeling the truth of one alternative —pollinator— makes the valid concerns of another identity seem way less serious. I can see the analogy to spiritual realization. Self-judgment makes little sense. Wanting to earn love through contribution —what’s that have to do with a plant’s reproduction? This contextualizes issues in an unimaginable diversity of true identities, giving me an incredible freedom to change points of view, play, and be creative. It helps me be empathetic when someone criticizes me, disagrees, or even ‘misunderstands’ me. Maybe they’re right, for them. For the plant I’m a pollinator, although I hardly think of myself that way. (New thought: When I’m eating honey, I’m part of the meta-pollination system?)

This kind of thinking can have dark sides—I’m guessing I’ve used it to avoid taking responsibility, just as much as I’ve used it to take too much responsibility (There’s nothing to rest on). But these mistakes produce results many of my identities don’t appreciate, so I quickly learn not to. With so much freedom, it seems natural to do things endosymbiotically, from as many identities as I can hold.

With love, Jordan