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From Thich Nhat Hanh:

Contemplate a piece of paper.

Look carefully and you can see a cloud in a piece of paper. Without a cloud there will be no rain; without rain the trees cannot grow; without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. There are other essential things for the paper to exist; the sun, the logger who cut down the tree, the wheat that feeds the logger, and on and on.

The essence of the teaching is that if you start with any one thing in the world and think of the things without which it would cease to be, and then branch off from those things and so on, you will eventually get to everything else that exists.

Every object is linked with every other object in the universe. It all inter-exists. If we look deeply we see that the existence of every single thing is possible only because of the existence of everything else.

Maybe one needs to look deeply to see the interdependence of everything in the universe, but sometimes the interconnections can stand out starkly and unexpectedly.

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