Rugged individualism is a fever dream. There is nothing individual about us. We are born in relationship with the earth and every green and growing thing. We are multicellular organisms, ecosystems embodied.

 

The fever dream of rugged individualism allows us to live in an inanimate world, full of resources for the taking. It strips the world of the cambrium of mystery and magic. But we are waking up from these nightmares. The inherent weave of life is becoming more and more obvious, even to those who steadfastly ignored it. This is the gift of this time. The gift doesn’t come without a price. But there is a gift here.

As we re-member the truth of our bodies as relational, our lives as inherently interdependent, we are tasked with relearning the art of boundaries. Boundaries, as the mainstream wellness world might have us thinking about them, are severe and complete. But relationships are messy, and communities require a comfort with imperfection.

 

So many articles and self-help books have been written about how to have healthy boundaries, how to prioritize one’s own wellbeing with scripts and rules. These models won’t help us as we collectively awaken from the nightmares imposed upon us by extractive capitalism. But lucky us, we are made of healthy, permeable, adaptive, responsive boundaries. As so is every animal, every plant, every fungi, every virus and bacteria. If we want to learn how to live in community, how to hold ourselves in relationships that can shift as needed, we only need to look to the cell membrane.

 

The cell membrane, also called the plasma membrane, gives the cell shape, protecting and separating the inner cell from the exterior environment, and regulating the exchange of materials into and out of the cell. Cell membranes are primarily formed by phospholipids, and these molecules arrange themselves into two layers; thus another way you may hear the cell membrane referred to is “the phospholipid bilayer.”

A phospholipid contains a phosphate group and a lipid group. Breaking that tongue-twister of a name down might not make it much more comprehensible on its own, but at least now we’ve shrunk it down into its components, and we can look at the parts to get a better understanding of the whole. We’ll start with the lipids.

 

The lipids in a phospholipid are fatty acids, made of carbon molecules bound to hydrogen molecules. As a general rule fatty acids are stable, and yet able to change. These stable yet changeable molecules are found in the cells of plants, animals, and fungi, meaning the entire living world is made of these small particles clinging together through the force of countless tiny bonds, repeated trillions of times in your own tiny body and multiplied to a nearly infinite number in all the plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, and fungi, in every living thing that ever was and ever will be. Can we allow our minds to expand into the immensity that all life is held together by bonds created by the need our very molecules have for each other?

 

Think of a little stick-figure drawing with no arms, just a head and two little legs. That is the basic shape of a phospholipid. The fatty acid tails of the lipid group are the little legs of this stick-figure phospholipid; the phosphate group is the head. The tails of the lipid group are nonpolar, meaning the electrons are shared evenly across the molecule. Their nonpolarity makes them insoluble in water and essentially impervious to it. The distribution of electrons in the phosphate group makes the head of the phospholipid negatively charged and attracted to water. The cell membrane forms a bilayer membrane because the hydrophilic (water loving) phosphate heads arrange themselves to face the extracellular and intercellular fluid, while the hydrophobic (water fearing) tails form the inner membrane. The nonpolarity of the tails keeps the membrane fluid and permeable, allowing channels within the membrane to open, thus making the membrane a selectively permeable barrier. The attachment of the hydrophobic tails to the hydrophilic heads means the heads can be pulled toward the water inside and outside of the cell without being dissolved into it.

 

When we consider how we might love each other in ways that are generative, rather than consuming, and how we might create boundaries that are responsive, rather than reactive, we can turn to the cell membrane. The structure of the bilayer membrane might offer us a clue as to how we can love in less desperate ways, keeping the parts of ourselves that would dissolve into another in protective relationship with the more impervious parts of ourselves, not to be cold or aloof, but because merging removes vibrancy. The cell membrane is showing us that intimacy does not mean dissolving into each other, but that community requires permeability. Life exists in so much vibrant diversity because cell membranes maintain separation, even within the intimacy of a single tissue, even within the pull of intense attraction.

 

I am learning that it is wise to follow the guide of the cell membranes, to love as the phospholipid bilayer loves.

 

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