My headcanon (for life)

My headcanon (for life):

I was dog-sitting one time in Southern Oregon for this derpy dog, Howard. Many walks we took - with INFP me deeply interested in understanding the mind of Howard, to understand why he felt so compelled to pull me to certain places, utterly uninterested in others. And this headcanon formed.

Howard, I realized, is a happy container for a vast universe of microbes. He rolls in them, inhales them - sniffing so so deeply, or shallowly - depending on how perked his ears get. He is a universe to these tiny things, and he’s happy to be so - wagging his tail and prancing along. I imagine it’s a happy little universe, there inside this derpy dog.

A while after the job ended, I was walking alone through the woods and noticed that everyone I passed was also a universe to microbes. And all of the creatures big and small that are in symbiotic relationships with them - we are all connected by them.

And unlike humans, microbes have a universal language that they all understand - it’s a chemical language. And this “chemistry” is no different than the chemistry humans talk about in relationships.

Chemistry tells something about how compatible our universes are.

What do dogs know about chemistry? Well, what if they are tuned to the same chemical language as the microbes are? What if they are listening to the chemical conversations and acting in service to their little universe by picking up and leaving microbes to create energetic equilibrium in their universe? Kind of god-like?

What if humans are also just this - universes to microbes. We just didn’t know this, so we created societies and concrete and soap and stuff. And maybe our connection is weakened because we don’t immerse ourselves in the microbe world - and well if we’re being honest we’ve had perpetual war with them since the invention of soap, Maybe this is why we can’t sense them anymore the way dogs can, or maybe we never could.

Or maybe we’re evolved to be more complex universes. Maybe the microbes are steering our evolution to help house them. Maybe the world of fungus got involved to wake us up to our actual reality - maybe we’re the horses in their war and we’re just becoming aware of it. Maybe they’re working together to wake us up so we don’t get stuck so much. So many possibilities - and we can’t even see them with our eyes, we’re only now with the invention of the microscope even really aware of this level of reality.

Anyway, so - if I’m a universe to a unique community of microbes (we all have our own unique microbiome, though, yeah - highly influenced by environment) then that seems like a pretty important job. If that’s what’s happening, I am god-like to them. My thoughts are their podcast. What I eat and drink is the only nourishment in their universe, besides what is designated as “me”. They digest our food and make our vitamins, and our excrement is largely made up of live and dead ones. We are god-like to 3-4 pounds of microbes. So are dogs. And cats. And probably everything else that’s alive.

We are all individual universes.

So, then, all of the chlorine in our water, and all of the antimicrobials, etc, etc - all this puts us at war with them. And so we’re at war with those that we are god-like to? Vengeful, even?

So, we go to war looking for peace, while we destroy microbiomes everywhere our technology goes…

No wonder this world is so full of anxiety.

What would it look like to live like we know we’re all individual, independent universes? We’d end up doing exactly what people have been saying we need to do. Eat more whole foods, spend more time in nature, tune our thoughts to a station worth being the voice of an entire world, honor ourselves as sacred, spend more time in awe…