It's beautiful! I love the images you conjure, your way of phrasing.

Thank YOU. Loving it.

Yes!!

Ooh, and this:
"They say every selkie
must love a human once, must learn
the different tastes of sea and sweat on skin."

And this--love this:

"Traveling was essential. She'd brought someone into the world; it stood to reason to show them as much of that inheritance as she could." --from @zzclaybourne.bsky.social' BREATH, WARMTH, AND DREAM.

"He breathed until he breathed himself down to a fine dot, and then, with one breath more, to a nothing" (!!)

"A woman so pale, she could be considered a light source" (😆)

"She took her leave, stepping into the brightness of an unfettered, cloudless sky." (+)

These might be the same clouds!

What a wonderful thought!

What makes for our sense of self--even an "individual" sense of self--is created from other things too, things exterior to us.

But I like your 2, too. I think that lived experience of connectedness across space has made a difference for how people imagine themselves in relation with others. And speaking of, there's the current idea that consciousness isn't just resident in our bodies, that (+)

and of course SF follows popular science ideas. So mycelia networks, slime molds, trees communicating, etc., and the sense of this as beautiful and healthy as opposed to oppressive and unnatural--and coming just when the consequences of individualism-on-steroids is so evident. (+)

Here via @sforrest.bsky.social, who follows you :-) I'm speaking as an SF fan who loves (and has written) stories along this line, and I agree with all your ideas. Your 1 and 3 dovetail: the sense that no entity is solitary, that we're part of a web, is v. current in science (+)

2) online life making a certain type of non-embodied experience more common; 3) the generalization of thinking in terms of ecosystems and biomes.

If anybody has other takes, I'd love to hear them.

It's not new, of course, but I feel like earlier it was mostly something negative, often a metaphor for totalitarianism (cf. the Borg), while now I see it presented more positively. Some explanations I can think of: 1) the political discredit of the "rugged individual" myth;

🫡