All People Are My Kin, All Things Are My Companions

Did you know that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were actually made inside a burning star billions of years ago?

It sounds like a fairy tale, but it is scientific fact. We are all made of stardust.

So, when the ancient Chinese philosophers said, "All people are my kin," they were right. We are literally part of the same family.

I felt this connection deeply when I was a child. I lived in Britain for a year. It was cold, and everything was different from my home in Guangdong.

II remember one rainy afternoon, sitting alone in my school library, reading Harry Potter. I was a Chinese girl reading about a British boy. I didn't understand every word, but I understood Harry's loneliness. When he discovered he belonged to a family—the wizarding world—I cried. Because I understood that feeling too. That year, I felt like Harry. Lost. Searching for home.

But then something happened. I started painting the landscapes around me—the English woods, the misty mornings. And as I painted them, I realized I was no longer seeing them as foreign. I was seeing them as part of me. The trees, the rain, the river near my school—they became my companions. They listened to my sadness without judgment.

That's when I understood: "Minbao" and "Wuyu" are not separate. They are connected.

The water cycle has no borders. The air I breathed in Britain carries the same oxygen as the air I breathe now. When I treat nature as my companion, I am also treating all people as my kin—because we all share the same water, the same air, the same stardust.

We are not islands. We are waves in the same ocean.

My dream is to look at Earth from space one day. From up there, you cannot see borders. You only see one blue home, one family, one living system.

So let us treat nature as our companion and each other as family. Because on this spaceship Earth, we are all we have.