A fantastic experience is having one of your long-held dualities collapse before your eyes, forcing everything in your world to be reorganized internally. Where water and oil once swirled around each other without the faintest trace of mixing, a duality collapsing reformats contrasting elements into a seamless oneness.

I had this experience last month. I was sitting on a break wall, on Panamá’s southern coast, looking east towards some high-rise condos. Behind them, a scrubby looking tropical-moist forest cloaked a coastal range in a greenish-bronze hue. The high-rise condos were brilliantly white like most buildings in the tropics, built to reflect the persistent heat. It was a bright, early dusk. A few lights shone from the condominium windows, but enough color was still left in the scene to starkly contrast the white monolithic towers with the greenish-bronze mountain backdrop. I was meditating, or trying at least, until an epiphany of sorts rippled across my mind, and the mindfulness session returned to thinking. But the thinking was well worth it this time.

As I stared at these buildings something fundamental about my normal, everyday perception was altered. They ceased being crude disruptions of the surrounding environment, as human civilization normally appears to me. Without the slightest alteration to their physical appearance, this cluster of towers changed radically in terms of how I was categorizing it. The towers became the natural constructions of a species, and I saw them as I would see a bee hive or a colony of coral. The fact that they were geometrically perfect, unlike all of their surroundings (with the exception of the flatness of the ocean surface) did nothing to disrupt the seamlessness of the natural picture, for the honeycomb within a hive is perfectly hexagonal. The fact that they were starting to glow from within similarly failed to interrupt their fusion with all things Earthen, for fireflies light up many a forest and bioluminescent tides sweep countless coastlines. The fact that I knew them to be highly engineered similarly had its natural aspect, for I saw beneath the vision the great constructions of beavers, ants, wasps, and termites. It was all natural. Animals crawl across this globe, and some do so by swimming or walking, whereas others hitchhike on fur or flesh. And some ride upon the chemistry of internal-combustion engines. It all is one great chemical storm——dynamic components inseparably a part of one totality. Animals built those towers gleaming there in the dusk——those white perfect prisms. To the bee the hexagon is the most efficient way to store honey and pollen. To the beaver damming a lake is better done with rounded edges, and yet to humans geometric designs dominate. For us, it’s simply easiest to replicate straight edges, easiest en masse to fabricate parts for rectangular rooms, and more efficient to furnish. Animals built those towers gleaming there in the dusk as they’ve built structures for eons. More lights flicked on in the small square windows as the dusk further settled, emblematic of the lives being lived within them. And the towers looked perfect there, as did the trees on the hillside behind them. It struck me that the only reason the towers had appeared strange to me for a lifetime was that I was seeing them from within the species that built them. The “artificial”, therefore, is but a synonym for “ours.” Perhaps to the beaver all is natural——one seamless world of plant and animal forms, until it happens upon a dam of its own kind. It knows (perhaps only intuitively) something about the effort and design that went in this structure. It can understand it from within. It has chanced upon an artificial object.

There are obvious differences between how Homo sapiens constructs its environment as compared to other species. But it was a real blessing, for a few minutes, to have seen those differences as differences of degree, and not of kind. We are different than other species, but we are still a species. A species of animal erecting towers, for that is simply how we’ve been driven to live.

Of course, it’s good to have that duality in place when necessary. Our species, though certainly one animal type among others, is in a state of unbridled expansion and influence. And I certainly don’t mean to insist that we should sit back and accept this human-induced global change as natural and therefore acceptable. But whether our expansion and influence is a good or bad thing is ultimately going to be judged and decided only by us. And that’s an interesting predicament to find oneself in. Ultimately, I can only hope we are a natural kind that, instead of total domination, prefers to have itself living in concert with a diverse assemblage of other kinds. We were given both the technological prowess to dominate the world as well as a sufficient dose of romanticism to lament that very same domination. And it’s more than romanticism. We will cripple ourselves in making the globe completely “artificial.” But all educated people know that. I write this to try and catalyze a (temporary) collapse in the natural/human dichotomy in the reader. It may prove a useful frame. It’s at least enjoyable, and at most critically necessary to see ourselves as strange animals from time to time. To see everything from within.