The Pattern We Keep Forgetting

A Letter About Wholeness

Pull up a chair for a minute. I’ve been carrying an idea around for a long time now, and every time I think I’ve reached the edge of it, life hands me another thread. Maybe you’ll think I’ve wandered too far into the woods. Maybe you’ll recognize something you’ve been noticing too. Either way, I’d love the company.

The older I get, the less interested I become in collecting beliefs and the more interested I become in recognizing patterns. Patterns don’t seem to care what language we use. They show up in biology and forests, in hospice rooms and galaxies, in psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. Different people give them different names, but sometimes I wonder if they’re all pointing toward the same truth from different directions.

One pattern keeps finding me.

Everything that thrives participates in something larger than itself.

Look at your own body. Somewhere around thirty-seven trillion cells are carrying out their own work at this very moment. Your heart doesn’t compete with your lungs. Your liver doesn’t wake up one morning and decide it doesn’t feel like helping anymore. Every cell communicates, adjusts, repairs, and responds to every other part. Biology calls this homeostasis, but the word itself barely captures what is happening. Homeostasis isn’t about remaining perfectly balanced. It’s the ongoing work of relationship. It is life continually finding its way back to itself because every part remembers it belongs to the whole.

The same thing happens in a forest.

At first, you see trees. Stay awhile, and you begin seeing relationships instead. Fungi move nutrients beneath the soil. Fallen logs become homes for insects, mosses, and new seedlings. Birds carry seeds across mountains. Rain becomes streams, streams become rivers, rivers become clouds, and clouds return as rain. Nothing exists entirely for itself. Every living thing participates in the life of everything else.

The forest isn’t simply a collection of organisms. It’s a conversation.

Hospice has taught me the very same lesson, only in a different language. People sometimes think my job is caring for dying patients, but that’s never really been true. I’ve always cared for families. When one person’s health changes, every relationship in the room shifts with it. Old wounds surface. Old love resurfaces too. People say things they’ve carried silently for decades. One person’s suffering ripples through everyone who loves them. Pull one thread, and the whole quilt moves.

That’s what finally made me stop and wonder if we’ve been looking at ourselves backward. We’ve been taught to think of ourselves as separate individuals who occasionally connect with one another. But what if connection isn’t something we create? What if connection is the reality we’ve forgotten?

The image that keeps coming to me is a quilt. Not because quilts are perfect, but because no single patch is the quilt. Every piece keeps its own color, its own shape, and its own story. The beauty doesn’t come from making every patch identical. It comes from every patch participating in something larger than itself. The quilt needs every thread precisely because every thread is different.

That thought quietly changed the way I think about God. For most of my life, I imagined God as someone outside the universe looking in. That’s how many of us were taught. But somewhere along the way, I started wondering if that picture was too small. What if God isn’t another being somewhere in the universe? What if God is the wholeness of reality itself?

Not just humanity. Not just nature. Not just spirit. The whole. Every galaxy. Every atom. Every tree. Every child. Every joy. Every grief. Everything we understand, and everything we don’t. The visible and the invisible. The known and the mysterious. Not a distant ruler standing outside the quilt. The living reality in which every thread exists.

I’ve also found myself wondering about consciousness.

For generations we’ve argued about whether consciousness is something the brain produces or something the brain receives. I don’t know the answer, and I’m comfortable admitting that. What fascinates me is something simpler. Awareness changes constantly throughout our lives while something deeper about being remains strangely familiar.

A newborn experiences the world differently than an elder. Dreams alter awareness. Meditation alters awareness. Grief alters awareness. Dementia alters awareness. Love alters awareness. Every season of life changes the way we experience reality.

Maybe what changes isn’t consciousness itself. Maybe what changes is awareness.

Perhaps awareness is like standing at different windows of the same house. Every window offers its own unique view, but none of them contains the entire landscape. We spend our lives looking through one particular window, often forgetting there are countless others opening onto the same world.

That possibility keeps bringing me back to the same question. What if consciousness isn’t something we possess? What if consciousness is something we participate in?

If that’s true, then individuality doesn’t become less important. It becomes sacred. Every life becomes a unique perspective through which reality experiences itself. No two people see exactly the same horizon, and maybe that’s the point.

Then one evening I read an early version of these thoughts to Sam. He listened quietly for a while, smiled, and said, “Everything has to combine itself to be complete.” Then he added something even simpler. “God is in all of us together.” Not God is in each of us. God is in all of us together.

That one little word changes everything. A violin can make beautiful music by itself, but it cannot become a symphony alone. The symphony doesn’t live inside any single instrument. It emerges because every instrument participates in something none of them could create on their own.

Maybe that’s true of us, too.

Eventually someone always asks the question that’s been asked for thousands of years. “What about evil?” If everything participates in God, where does cruelty come from? Where do hatred, violence, greed, and suffering fit? I don’t know that anyone has ever answered that completely, but this is where my own thoughts have settled.

Maybe evil isn’t another thread woven into the quilt. Maybe evil is the tear.

Think about the body again. Disease often begins when communication breaks down. Cancer starts with ordinary cells that stop participating in the health of the whole. They begin acting as though the body exists for them instead of remembering they exist because of the body. Homeostasis gives way to fragmentation.

The body suffers because relationship has been damaged. Maybe human suffering follows a similar pattern. Hatred tears relationship. Greed tears relationship. Fear tears relationship. Violence tears relationship. Dehumanization tears relationship.

None of those things create a new fabric. They unravel the one that already exists.

Maybe evil isn’t the opposite of God. Maybe it’s what happens wherever participation gives way to separation. And maybe healing has always been the work of weaving again. Not pretending wounds never happened. Not forcing everyone to become the same.

Actually mending what has been torn.

Maybe that’s why love has always seemed so powerful. Not because it’s sentimental. Not because it agrees with everyone. But because love restores relationship. Love remembers the whole when the parts have forgotten.

Over the years, even the words of Jesus have begun sounding different to me. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” I used to hear that as though each of us carried around our own tiny kingdom. Now I wonder if He meant something much bigger. Maybe every thread carries the pattern of the whole quilt. Maybe every human being is a place where the whole briefly becomes aware of itself from one unique perspective.

Maybe that’s why every life matters.

Not because we’re identical. Because we’re irreplaceable.

I don’t know if any of this is right. I’m not trying to start a new religion, and I’m certainly not claiming to have solved questions that philosophers have wrestled with for thousands of years. I’m simply following a pattern that keeps showing up wherever I look.

In biology. In forests. In hospice. In children. In old age. In science. In spirituality. In love.

They all seem to whisper the same thing. Life flourishes wherever participation is stronger than separation. Maybe that’s the pattern we keep forgetting. And maybe the work of being human isn’t to escape this world or conquer it. Maybe it’s to notice the thread we’ve been given, weave it with as much kindness and courage as we can, and help mend the places where the fabric has been torn.

I don’t know. But the older I get, the more beautiful that possibility becomes. So if you’ve made it this far, thank you for sitting on the porch with me. I’d love to know what patterns you’ve been seeing.