Today I hiked into my favorite swimming hole with a friend. The sky was blue, the cedar-lined path dappled in sunshine. The river was full of fast-moving sparkles and splashings. We warmed on the rocks after our cooling swim, and marveled at the water. The water is made up of individual water droplets, and those droplets are endlessly merging with one another to create the river. The river is a constant being, contained by the canyon it rushes through, yet it is never the same because there is always new water arriving and moving along. The river is water droplets and it is a body of water, it is constant and it is constantly changing.

This reminds me of Holons, a term coined by Arthur Koestler which describes the relationship of everything in the Universe. Everything is both itself and a piece in something larger—both a whole and a part. I am a human being, but I am also only one part of all the energy that creates the universe. I am a human being, but I am also made up of parts that are called cells. Each of those cells is made up of parts called atoms. Each atom is like a little solar system, with little planets and moons, called electrons, circling in it.

My friend and I were talking about this. We wondered: what if we could go deeper and deeper and deeper into those atoms. What if we went so far into the space between electrons that we eventually came out in a place that is the same as the Universe? What if what we see when we look up into the night sky is really just the deep space a single atom?