You might've seen a news item: Crohn's Disease (almost) cured with a drink containing common microscopic parasites. Ok, yuk is the first thought, but only if you're not familiar with the yuk of living with Crohn's. A friend of mine is. Let's just say that it's intestinal disruption. Perhaps she took an anti-biotic that killed off the good bugs with the bad. (Be careful with anti-biotics because you are biotic!)

The point is: if they're a common internal resident--so much so that our bodies evolved to live comfortably with them --they... are... us. They are part of our being, as much as the tinier bacteria in our gut that we also could not live without. Where then could the defined line/surface be, between "you" and mIcroscopic "them"? Where do you stop and they begin?

What is a parasite, anyway? An organism that feeds off another organism of a different species or order, without returning any benefit. But the human intestinal system has, over a few million years, evolved to tolerate, or even make use of the presence of many of them. Our toleration is sometimes so active that without them to balance our counter-activity, we become ill. Many of these, even those we merely tolerate to the point of being ill without them, can no longer be defined as parasites. They're symbionts.

All grand revelations about the nature of things seem esoteric till well and simply stated, when suddenly they seem obvious and common knowledge.
. . Lynn Margulis, one of the two progenitors of the Gaia Theory, put forth an hypothesis (Endo-Symbiosis) that our every cell is a conglomeration of once-free-living organisms that swallowed another or got swallowed, and found the symbiosis worked out well. (or it didn't and died.) Thus, life-forms worked their way toward complexity.

In the same way, what we call Gaia is the single organism that "contains" all the life we see, and is in a constantly-adjusting symbiosis with it all. The supposed individual we think we are is but one of those cells. This is very close to being not a metaphor, but a literal description. I call it Meta-symbiosis, to match Margulis' term.

Some inner "bugs" don't directly help you. Some do; they're part of the balance that controls the helpful ones. Some are not. Same thing on the other scale. But even those not directly involved with our species are all indirectly involved. If they're on Earth, they're part of it, and have their part to play --it can't be avoided. Eat and avoid getting eaten, then reproduce. As each species and "individual" fights to do that, his fight involves at least the things he tries to eat and the things that try to eat him. All the way between sunlight-on-chlorophyl to... but there is no "final predator"--the biggest whale or polar bear is slowly eaten during his life, and quickly after, by the smallest predators: the bacteria. The protein goes around and around.
The balance needed between all life-forms is provided by all those life-forms. Any change --e.g. the extinction of one-- has repercussions all the way around the chain, and has some effect on the human species. (not that that's the purpose or the most important species to Gaia!)

So on the other scale, where do "you" stop, and the mAcroscopic "world" begin? Only as far as your nerves can feel? The surface of your skin? Not exactly. Just as those "bugs" are you because they're necessary to your life-processes, so too are the other life-forms outside your body. Trees and grasses, obviously, produce the oxygen. Oxygen supports all life, and our inFernal-combustion machines. Trees keep jets in the air.

The term "you/me" has to include the inner "bugs", 'cause you'd die without them, right? Same thing on the other scale.

I do not simply mean that we'd die without something to eat. We're clever enough to be the last species standing (other than the cockroach, of course). But without all those balance-sustaining interactions, the balance is lost, and the whole house of cards falls apart--us with it.

Therefore, it's similar thru both the microscope and the telescope. Cogs in a gear-wheel are not separate from the wheel, nor would they exist without the machine they're in. If one gear strips another, the entire machine malfunctions or stops.

We are not only dependent, and interdependent, we are what we can't live without. That intestinal bacteria or "parasite" is equal to your kidney. That earthworm, that eagle, that dolphin, that mosquito, even that river, that atmosphere... that's you.

That's awesome enough to call a religion. Finding who and where you are is what it's all about, right?

You are here; between genius and the Kansas Board of Education-Avoidance; between the bacteria and the Blue Whale; between the magma and the vacuum; between your first awareness and your last--in the glorious "here" between not-here and not-here.