Introduction
I often wonder whether the invention of the mirror changed how we see ourselves and separated us from the interconnected world we belong to. Before mirrors, we could only glimpse our reflection in Nature, perhaps in a river or a pool of water. The mirror zooms out others and turns our gaze inward. It focuses attention on the individual face rather than the wider family of life. The mirror therefore shows the face, but it is kinship that reveals the family.
This deeper recognition of family lies at the heart of my transcultural framework. It is grounded in the conviction that existence itself is relational rather than individual. It is expressed through the Tuko Sawa concept of equality by creation and through upendo bila sababu (love without reason), a form of love that precedes transaction, condition, or reward. This upendo is the recognition of the self in the other, not as mirror-like sameness, but as fellow inhabitants of our shared home, planet Earth.
An Ontological Crossroads
A recent conversation with my friend Pastor Siri Strommen brought me back to a persistent question: what does it mean to love?
Siri has created a fifteen-week series titled The Curriculum of Love: Deepening Your Love for God, Your Neighbour, and Yourself. During our conversation, I kept returning to the nature of love itself. Where does love of self end and love of neighbour or God begin? Are these distinctions — though important ethically and theologically — different kinds of love, or do they point to a deeper way of relating to reality?
Modern civilisation stands at an ontological crossroads. With rising social fragmentation, ecological degradation, loneliness, and spiritual disconnection, the question is not only whether we love sufficiently, but how love is understood in the first place. Cartesian dualism and materialist reductionism have trained the modern mind to interpret love primarily as emotion or biochemical process. In doing so, love is severed from the wider web of life. This is what King Charles III, in Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, describes as “the great divorce” — when Western civilisation largely abandoned traditional wisdom and spiritual connection to the Earth, choosing instead to view the planet as a giant, unfeeling machine to be mastered, dissected, and exploited.
This essay proposes that love is best understood not first as emotion, moral duty, or virtue, but as the recognition of kinship. Kinship extends beyond biological relation. It denotes shared existence within a relational web in which all living beings are interdependent. Love begins at the moment another being is recognised as kin, and their intrinsic value and dignity are acknowledged.
From this view, love of self, neighbour, God, and creation are not separate categories but expressions of relational awareness. Many contemporary crises may be understood as symptoms of a diminished capacity to perceive life as fundamentally interconnected.
Modern societies often organise around the ideal of the autonomous individual. Human success is frequently measured in material terms, while collective wellbeing is reduced to GDP and related indicators. In this framework, interdependence becomes obscured. A form of spiritual emptiness emerges, and transactional logics begin to replace relational life. Love loses its character as upendo bila sababu (love without reason) and becomes conditional. When love is given or withheld conditionally, scarcity becomes the prevailing perception, and fear follows.
Becoming “Ecologically Saved”
My understanding of love as kinship developed through lived transcultural experience and continues to evolve.
As a young Tanzanian student in Wonsan, North Korea, in the early 1980s, I entered a context that challenged many inherited assumptions. There were no churches, Bibles, or prayer groups available to me. The experience was disorienting. It sharpened my attention to what anchors moral life when God is not part of the learned narrative.
I observed a moral life among the people around me. In daily life, people were caring, attentive, and treated others with dignity. This consistency of ethical behaviour prompted a reassessment of earlier assumptions: how could such moral life exist without explicit reference to religious doctrine?
Something shifted. I began to see that goodness does not depend on a particular belief system. It arises from relational care and responsibility toward others — what I later summarised as: serve others, and if this is not possible, at least do no harm. During this period, I experienced what I later described, somewhat playfully, as being “ecologically saved.” This was not a rejection of faith, but an expansion of perception. The sacred was no longer confined to institutions, texts, or ritual practice. It appeared in human life, in Nature, and in ordinary communal life. Food on the table became a form of relational communion, because what is consumed becomes part of the living body. Waking each morning became an experience of attentiveness and gratitude.
My Grandmother’s Wisdom
This shift helped me recognise forms of wisdom already present in my cultural inheritance.
Before leaving for North Korea, I visited my grandmother for a blessing. Her prayer was almost entirely gratitude. She thanked the Creator for life, health, hands, feet, breath, food, family, and the continuity of existence. She then named my ancestors one by one, speaking of them as still present and attentive.
Her prayer was not about asking for things. It was an expression of belonging rather than scarcity.
This way of seeing life also appeared in naming practices. She named my mother Ndeshaaranyiya, a Chagga name meaning “I have listened to all that.” Although I was christened Regina, she called me Naaikye — “the one who should be thanked.” My personal motto, #WalkingWithGratitude, comes from this orientation.
Scholarship on Indigenous ways of understanding life, including the work of Joy Dumsile Ndwandwe on African humanism and leadership, gives language to what I experienced. What is emphasised is not separation between human beings, ancestors, land, and the wider living world, but continuity between them. Life is understood as connected rather than divided.
Kinship and Contemporary Science
Contemporary science increasingly supports this relational understanding of life.
Evolutionary biology shows that all life shares a common ancestry. Life is not a collection of separate entities, but a continuous unfolding of relations over time. Microbial systems sustain ecological stability. Plants convert solar energy into the conditions for life. Fungi enable decomposition and renewal. Insects maintain pollination networks. Animal life depends on multiple layers of interdependence. Even the human body is now understood as a symbiotic system rather than a self-contained unit.
Stephen Fry’s Wonderful Life presents this same relational insight in accessible form. Through accounts of microbes, fungi, insects, plants, animals, and humans, it shows life as sustained through extensive networks of dependence. The closer one looks at living systems, the less coherent the idea of biological separation becomes.
In Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (2010), King Charles III calls for a shift in perception towards the interconnected harmony of life. Indigenous knowledge systems similarly understand the world as a web of reciprocal relations. Industrial modernity, by contrast, often separates knowledge from relationship, producing imbalance. Addressing this requires more than information; it requires a recovery of relational perception.
I have witnessed this across my life in Tanzania, North Korea, China, Russia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Change rarely emerges from information alone. It begins with a shift in perception. Knowledge may deepen understanding, but it is our relationship to knowledge that determines how it is lived. When perception shifts, strangers become neighbours, environments become communities, and existence becomes a field of kinship.
Francis of Assisi and the Family of Creation
Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century Christian friar, viewed the world through a deeply relational and ecological lens. In his Canticle of the Creatures, he addresses the natural world as kin: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire, Sister Mother Earth, and Sister Bodily Death.
This expresses a relational understanding of existence in which humans live within, rather than above, the wider community of life. Kinship replaces ownership, and relationship replaces domination.
Francis’s vision resonates with Indigenous cosmologies that similarly understand existence as fundamentally relational. Across different historical and cultural contexts, both affirm that life is sustained through horizontal interdependence. Trees, rivers, animals, ancestors, and humans belong to a single continuum of life.
The Canticle of the Creatures is a statement of relational reality. It affirms that the world is not a repository of resources but a community of relations.
Francis offers one articulation of this insight. Indigenous traditions and my grandmother’s practice offer others. Contemporary biology and ecological philosophy further reinforce the same principle: life is constituted through relationships.
My practice of greeting old trees in Kiswahili — “Shikamoo Bibi” or “Shikamoo Babu” — emerges from this orientation. “Shikamoo” comes from shika (hold) and moyo (heart), literally meaning “hold my heart.” “Bibi” means grandmother and “Babu” means grandfather. I take time to touch the tree and express gratitude. This is my way of showing reverence for Elders who have been here longer than I.
Re-membering Kinship
The implications are both ontological and ethical. Existence is not composed of isolated individuals, but of relations in continuous interaction.
Our task is therefore not to create kinship, but to recognise what already exists.
Before philosophy, religion, or science, life was understood through relations of dependence and reciprocity. Love is not an addition to reality, but a response to reality as it is.
If contemporary crises are fundamentally crises of perception, then recovering kinship is an urgent intellectual, ethical, ecological, and spiritual task. It involves restoring awareness of the relational fabric that sustains life.
The world is not a collection of isolated objects.
It is a communion of relations.
The mirror shows the face.
Kinship reveals the family.
Charles, King, Tony Juniper, and Ian Skelly. Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. London: HarperCollins, 2010.
Francis of Assisi. Canticle of the Creatures (c. 1224–1225).
Ndwandwe, Joy Dumsile. Negating, Resisting or Affirming Cosmological Principles: Towards an African Humanism Leadership Theory and Model. Master's thesis, University of South Africa, 2015.
Wonderful Life with Stephen Fry. Narrated by Stephen Fry. Audible Originals, 2026. https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Wonderful-Life-with-Stephen-Fry-Audiobook/B0GWRNPN1V