If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there can be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and [sic] without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.... If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper.... And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And, the logger's father and mother are in it, too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it, too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is also part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here -- time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals, the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper.... You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to be with every other thing.
Exert from an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk from Mindfulness and Meaningful Work: Explorations in Right Livlihood edited by Claude Whitmyer