~ It was as if everything in the world, even seemingly complete beings, were born missing one small vital component that someone or something else had in their possession and that everything and everyone had something, without which someone or something else could never even happen without. Something unique for each, but who universally was incomplete without. To be whole we had to "court" the "other," not boss, commandeer, force, or seduce, the other to "obtain" what we as incomplete beings required to truly live. The grass needed the carbon dioxide of the swamp, and the sea turtle the vital sea oils of the eel, the hermit crab the shell of the moon snail; the atmosphere needed the fertile crossfire of the lightning serpent's scales of ozone. This was the definition of the Tzutujil word for life: mutual indebtedness. The whole world was a ritual of a million component rituals in which every being kept alive another being by courting them by the beauty of their innate natures in order to be graced with the gift the other held of what each was missing. ~

-- Martín Prechtel